The Reluctant Fundamentalist

The Reluctant Fundamentalist is a novel by the Pakistani writer Mohsin Hamid, published in 2007.

The whole book is a monologue delivered over the course of one evening, and the frame is the device that makes it work: the reader only ever hears one side of the conversation, so the stranger's discomfort has to be inferred from Changez's replies to questions nobody else has heard. Changez is a good talker, and part of the novel's pleasure is working out how much of his account is an explanation and how much is a performance for the man sitting opposite him. He describes a brilliant career, a Princeton education and a job at Underwood Samson, a firm that values companies for a living, and the novel is precise about what it felt like to be good at that work and how the world looked from inside it. What changes is his reading of the country that employed him, and the reader is left to decide how much of the unease in the cafe belongs to the American and how much to the narrator. Hamid wrote a shorter version of the material as a story in The Paris Review in 2006, and Mira Nair's film version premiered at the Venice Film Festival in 2012.