"I suspect you are looking at me with a degree of revulsion". With a slightly stilted politeness ("if you will permit me"), he explains himself to a listener who is, he assumes, not disposed to be sympathetic. (The novel is short enough to be read in one sitting.) They drink tea in a Lahore café they eat together they walk back through now dark streets to the American's hotel. Over the course of an evening, Changez talks to an American, whom he has met in the centre of Lahore. What is most unusual about this first-person narration is its form: it is addressed to an unnamed listener, an interlocutor. Now an academic, he agitates against American influence on his country, how innocently it is unclear. I n Mohsin Hamid's The Reluctant Fundamentalist, 25-year-old Changez tells the story of how he left his home in Pakistan to study at Princeton, how he became a successful analyst in a New York valuation firm, and how, in the wake of 9/11, he became sick of America and its power and returned to live in Lahore.
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