Author: Mohsin Hamid

Publisher: Penguin Books

First published: 2013

Setting: Asia
Read in March 2014

My Rating ★★     2.4

My Waterstones Review

“Disappointing, try The Reluctant Fundamentalist”

I had high expectations, forty endorsements from newspapers and magazines, and a front page quote from Philip Pullman, I found the latest book from Mohsin Hamid lacking in any depth, bordering on the boring and somewhat annoying. The disappointment was that I loved his previous bestseller The Reluctant Fundamentalist which is also written in the second person narrative, this was only pipped by a Graham Greene in the forty odd books I read in 2013. Annoying because the start of each chapter began to get under my skin and irritate and the 228 pages was padded with white space to the extent that really the book should only be taking up half the space in our library. Perhaps I am missing something, but it did not hit my button, not to any degree.

Book Review

My expectations were high having loved Mohsin’s previous book The Reluctant Fundamentalist, ultimately it was like falling off a cliff, it didn’t take long to get to the end and the view got progressively worse as I realised it was never going to improve. In a literary sense it made me feel somewhat inadequate, the publishers had provided forty endorsements from a series of papers and magazines, and Philip Pulman thought it ‘Intriguing, compelling and moving. A marvellous book’. What did I miss!

It opens by explaining that this is a self-help book, it isn’t. Its chapter titles suggest an order for a would-be entrepreneur; Move to the city, Get an education, Don’t fall in love….Have an exit strategy, these are used as a framework for the life story of an Asian who starts life as a country boy in a single mud-walled room. It feels more like a love story, boy meets girl, will they get together?

Each chapter starts with a page or so reminding us that we are back in self-help mode, before returning to the storyline. We are traveling through life at breakneck speed, it feels like we are continually jumping in time and lacks a degree of continuity. This is a short book, a page turner for all the wrong reasons, 12 chapters, 228 pages with 4 pages of white space between each chapter and an unusual line spacing that only manages 24-25 lines per page, this should by rights be filling only half the space in my library.

Written in the second person narrative some of the sentences were unnecessarily difficult to read, this was normally at the beginning of each chapter so much so that I began to dread the end of each chapter and these came round often enough. This was a great pity, as the second person narrative was one of the reasons why I liked The Reluctant Fundamentalist, it was refreshingly different. Ultimately, this book had very little depth, bordering on the boring, and annoying, but I really must have missed something, didn’t I?