For some time now, I have been wanting to write about Mohsin Hamid’s new novel, The Reluctant Fundamentalist. I had posted an announcement about the book’s imminent publication, and my inbox had filled up with messages from various folk wondering what exactly I had meant to say about the dilemmas of a Muslim writer in the post-September 11 world. Now, I’ve finished reading the book and I can say that this intelligent novelist is aware of the questions that surround the existence of a Muslim (and not simply a Muslim writer) in a polarized world; the answers he provides are as thoughtful as they are ideological, and they are advanced within the structure of fluid, finely-modulated monologue. The narrator sits across from his American interlocutor in a Lahore cafe: his monologue, delivered in the course of an evening, is the account of a young Pakistani man’s stay in America and his dispirited return home. What gave me special pleasure is that, as in his first novel Moth Smoke, much of the energy in the story comes from the anxieties of a precarious upward mobility. This logic, incidentally, holds better in the realm of love than it does in the arena of geopolitics–or at least it is more readily intelligible as such, and that makes the first half of the new novel more absorbing than the preachier latter half. Nevertheless, as in Moth Smoke, Hamid is not afraid to let tales of love and class play themselves out against a backdrop of nations at war, and what we get is the social drama of Patricia Highsmith mixed with the urgent political ambitions and clarity of a younger, much lamented, Salman Rushdie.

mohsin-hamid-reluctant-fundamentalist

Writer Amit Chaudhuri (about whom my views here and here) has a new music album coming out. Salil Tripathi has a report in the Asian edition of the Wall Street Journal. An excerpt:

The new album, “This is Not Fusion,” performed in London, Lille, Brussels and Kolkata, will be released later this month in India. It is about leaving one tradition for another through a half-remembered tune and improvising the melody. Music critic Ivan Hewett writes in the Daily Telegraph: “There is all the difference in the world between a genuine cultural fusion and a shotgun wedding…[Mr. Chaudhuri’s] novels deal with the difficulties of the cross-cultural lives [of many people] like himself who’ve been educated abroad. Returning home, they find their sensibilities have changed, and with that change there comes a confusion.” The songs born from that confusion are an exchange between two traditions.

And so Mr. Chaudhuri discovers hints of raga Gurjari Todi — one of several forms of classical melody — in Eric Clapton’s riff in “Layla,” and as he listens to Auld Lang Syne, the melody from the Scottish highlands, he recalls Pahadi tunes in raga Bhopali. “I find these transitions fascinating; they are the result of mishearings, but these mishearings matter to me,” he says. “It is as if those pieces were separated at birth.”

amit-chaudhuri-salil-tripathi