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Critics' Opinion:
Readers' Opinion:
First Published:
Apr 2007, 192 pages
Paperback:
Apr 2008, 192 pages
Book Reviewed by:
BookBrowse Review Team
Mohsin Hamid, who now lives in
London, grew up in Lahore,
Pakistan, and attended Princeton
and Harvard. Like Changez, he
has also spent time in Chile and
the Philippines but he assures
the reader in the
interview you can read at
BookBrowse that, while he has
inhabited the geography of Changez's world, he is not
Changez.
His first novel,
Moth Smoke, was a Betty
Trask Award winner, PEN/
Hemingway Award finalist, and
New York Times Notable Book of
the Year. His writing has also
appeared in Time, The New York
Times, and other publications.
He completed the first draft of
The Reluctant Fundamentalist
in the summer of 2001. After
September 11 he wrote and
rewrote it, completing seven
drafts before arriving at his
final version - eventually
honing a 1,000 page manuscript
down to a 180-page book.
"I believe that the core skill of a novelist is empathy: the ability to imagine what someone else might feel. And I believe that the world is suffering from a deficit of empathy at the moment. The political positions of both Osama Bin Laden and George W. Bush are founded on failures of empathy, failures of compassion toward people who seem different. By taking readers inside a man who both loves and is angered by America, and by allowing readers to feel what that man feels, I hope to show that the world is more complicated than politicians and newspapers usually make it seem. We need to stop being so confused by the fear we are fed; A shared humanity should unite us with people we are encouraged to think of as our enemies." - Mohsin Hamid (more).
This article was originally published in September 2007, and has been updated for the
April 2008 paperback release.
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