UNITED KINGDOM: Pakistani author Mohsin Hamid's second novel, 'The Reluctant Fundamentalist' has been shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize

A bearded Pakistani man accosts an American stranger in a coffee shop in Lahore, and tells him the story of his journey from the cradle of the American dream to a state of fundamental crisis. Mohsin Hamid's account of a Pakistani-born Princeton-educated management consultant's transformation into a 'reluctant fundamentalist' after al-Qaeda's attack on the United States on September 11, 2001, has landed him on the much-coveted Man Booker Prize for Fiction shortlist this year. "For me the title is, you know, 'Changez the Reluctant Fundamentalist,' not because he is particularly religious. He is not all that religious actually, although he is a Muslim. He is under suspicion of being a fundamentalist. In that sense, sort of, we're all reluctant fundamentalists when we live abroad, particularly in the West, until we prove otherwise. But also he begins to act, even though he is not that religious, as a kind of Muslim nationalist. And in that sense reluctantly he starts to act in fundamentalist terms, in ways we might think of as being fundamentalist. But also he works for a company that, the values of the company, it's a finance company and he begins to see this as a kind of economic fundamentalism and he is reluctant to participate in that economic fundamentalism. So the novel, I think, plays with what the idea of fundamentalism is, and all three ideas in the book have nothing really to do with religion," Hamid told Reuters in London on Thursday (September 13). With his book described by chair of judges Howard Davis as 'a subtle and thoughtful examination of the raw meat of Anglo-Saxon capitalism, and one man's personal response to working within it', 35-year-old Hamid's nomination makes him the youngest author on the panel of six. The rest of the shortlist includes: Darkmans by Nicola Barker (4th Estate), The Gathering by Anne Enright (Jonathan Cape), Mister Pip by Lloyd Jones (John Murray), On Chesil Beach by Ian McEwan (Jonathan Cape), and Animal's People by Indra Sinha (Simon & Schuster). 'The Reluctant Fundamentalist' (Hamish Hamilton) tackles the xenophobia that certain ethnic minorities suffer in the West post 9/11, especially Muslims who came to be stereotyped as potential fundamentalists. Hamid also explores what he calls the 'feeling of pleasure' that some felt when the U.S. was attacked, disassociating it from fundamentalist ideals. "Resentment towards America exists in lots of places around the world. Some people, I think, thought of September 11 more in symbolic terms -- as a slap in the face of America -- than in human terms -- as 3000 people being slaughtered. And I think that was the basis of that sense of pleasure that some people had," Hamid said. The novel also grapples with themes of loss and the desire to restore the past, embodied by the character Erica, the main character Changez's troubled American girlfriend. "She is somebody who suffers from a kind of crippling nostalgia. She longs for the past and I think that is something which is a predicament that much of the world suffers from in the 21st century. So in the Muslim world you have calls to the past embodied in people like Osama Bin Laden who called for a caliphate like medieval Muslim times and in America you have George Bush speaking about the 'Axis of Evil' harking back to the second world war with the use of that sort of terminology, and in Europe you have people talking about a 'pure' Europe before all these immigrants arrived. So all these nostalgic claims are out there in the world and competing for our attention. And I think people are vulnerable to claims of nostalgia because they feel very uncertain about the future," Hamid added. The winner will be announced on Oct. 16 at the Guildhall in London and will receive 50,000 pound sterling and world recognition. Like his main character Changez, Mohsin Hamid was born in Lahore, studied at Princeton and Harvard Law School, and worked as a management consultant in New York. He now lives in London.

ITN Source | September 16, 2007

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