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How to pronounce Mohsin Hamid: Moh-sin Hum-eed
Mohsin Hamid is the author of four novels, Moth Smoke, The Reluctant Fundamentalist, How to Get Filthy Rich in Rising Asia, and Exit West, and a book of essays, Discontent and Its Civilizations.
His writing has been featured on bestseller lists, adapted for the cinema, shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize, selected as winner or finalist of twenty awards, and translated into thirty-five languages.
Born in Lahore, Pakistan, he has spent about half his life there and much of the rest in London, New York, and California.
Mohsin Hamid's website
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The Reluctant Fundamentalist is a monologue about a young Pakistanis experiences in America at the time of the 9/11 attacks. What made you choose this format, which has the Pakistani telling his tale to an American whose voice is never actually heard?
The form of the novel, with the narrator and his audience both acting as characters, allowed me to mirror the mutual suspicion with which America and Pakistan (or the Muslim world) look at one another. The Pakistani narrator wonders: Is this just a normal guy or is he a killer out to get me? The American man who is his audience wonders the same. And this allows the novel to inhabit the interior emotional world much like the exterior political world in which it will be read. The form of the novel is an invitation to the reader. If the reader accepts, then he or she will be called upon to judge the novels outcome and shape its ending.
Your protagonist, Changez, faces both internal and external pressures as a foreigner living in a country thats shocked into a volatile patriotism. What was your biggest challenge in writing about his experience?
My biggest challenge was not having the delicate architecture of the novelits plot and characters...
He has only half learned the art of reading who has not added to it the more refined art of skipping and skimming
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