On the fictional - and real - marketization of water Your purchase helps support NPR programming. More important, she blossoms into a devoted friend - sometimes a sexual companion, mostly not, but always the object of our hero's overarching longing for something to assuage his essential loneliness.Close overlay Buy Featured Book Title How To Get Filthy Rich In Rising Asia Author Mohsin Hamid 'The pretty girl' grows up to join what passes for big-city bohemian life and eventually becomes a savvy show-business presence. The secondary characters - his mother and father, for example, and to a lesser extent his wife and children - fit beautifully into this scheme.Īnd there's another fine and moving example of this in our hero's lifelong attraction for one of his neighbors, a streetwise young woman whom Hamid calls 'the pretty girl.' Our hero first encounters her when both are adolescents, wandering the streets of the nameless city where they both scratch out a living. Thanks to Hamid's meticulous use of detail - and his sympathy for a man on the make in a society of endemic poverty - we engage deeply with a serious character whose essence remains his own yet who stands as a figure representative of his time and place, an effect only the best novelists can create.

Interviews Novelists See Pakistan as Land of Contradictions

In Chapter 1: Move to the City, the narrator first introduces - and addresses - the nameless hero, a village child 'shivering, on the packed earth' under his mother's cot one cold, dewy morning. How to Get Filthy Rich in Rising Asia uses the conceit of a how-to book for South Asians the book's exemplar is a country boy on the make, always referred to in the second person, as 'you.' Though there's a danger some will find this structure and form of address forced or artificial, you, the reader, quickly get caught up in Hamid's extremely detailed account of a life of upward social mobility in what we usually regard as a caste- and classbound part of the world. After all, this story takes the form of a gimmick, and gimmicks usually work against real quality.

As I read this novel about the dark and light of success in a world of social instability, I kept asking myself how much I might be inflating the value of Hamid's novel by rating it so highly. Scott Fitzgerald's quintessential American work. But his new novel - his third and, I think, best so far - reminded me of F. Novelist Mohsin Hamid lives in Lahore, Pakistan, quite some distance from the Long Island of Jay Gatsby. Close overlay Buy Featured Book Title How To Get Filthy Rich In Rising Asia Author Mohsin Hamid

Mohsin hamid how to get filthy rich