Wednesday, January 8, 2014

Mohsin Hamid - How to Get FILTHY RICH in Rising Asia

Finally, finally, here it is - the review I promised you so many months ago.

I stumbled across this book by accident. I loved Mohsin Hamid's The Reluctant Fundamentalist but had no idea Hamid had published other books since. I was looking for a new book to read and trawled through my go-to book-related sites (which include various book blogs, Amazon, the Guardian books section, the New York Times and Goodreads). And I started hearing good things about this book with a funny title. In a Booker discussion group on Goodreads, for example, this book joined members in unanimity - they all thought it was a shoe-in for the longlist (in fact it was NOT longlisted, though Hamid has previously been on the shortlist for TRF).  When I saw that it was by Mohsin Hamid, my mind was made up and I lifted my finger for that all-important 'click' which is the simple action of purchasing a Kindle book on Amazon.

It was soon obvious this was a good choice. After reading only a few pages I was in. The story moves at a galloping pace and the portrait depicted of Pakistan is neon vivid. Bearing some initial resemblance to Aravind Adiga's book White Tiger (though that was set in India), How to Get Filthy Rich is the story of a poor boy rising to the heights of corporate success in Asia.

Hamid chooses to tell the story in the second-person, which is quite rare, and he uses an unusual conceit: the book is written as though it were a self-help book. Each chapter doles out a different piece of advice about how to transform oneself from a peasant living in an impoverished rural environment to a wealthy entrepreneur in a big city. There are chapters entitled 'Learn from a Master', 'Work for Yourself' and 'Befriend a Bureaucrat'. Hamid is heavy on the irony and much of the book is darkly comical.

Initially I was resistant to both the second-person narration and the self-help lingo, but I soon fell into the story. The thing about second-person narration is that it forces the reader to become subjectively involved in the story. It personalizes everything. You become the hero. So that when something happens to 'you', we feel like it might be happening to us. It works.

The facade of the self-help book, however, is potentially a different story. Yes, it provides Hamid with the ability to comment, at the start of each chapter, on the plight of those living in modern-day Asia, on the notion of self-help books as a genre (a genre which is parodied here with brutal accuracy), and on the notion of selfhood itself - 'the idea of self in the land of self-help is a slippery one'. It allows him, in short, to ruminate on bigger political and philosophical issues, outside of the story he is telling at the book's core. The obvious problem with this is that it takes him (and us) outside of the story. But the conceit also allows Hamid to tell a story that is bigger than the characters. The characters are devices, in some way; their story is a synecdoche for the greater story, that of Pakistan itself.

Hamid is such an effective story teller that I was never weighed down by lofty political commentary. I was quickly caught up in the vivid coming-of-age story at the centre of the narrative, about a man (whose name we never learn), his quest for success, and the woman he has always loved. It is a tale about what it takes to succeed in a land still weighed down by a deeply entrenched class system and systemic corruption. The frequent interruptions for philosophical musings didn't disrupt my enjoyment of the book. In fact, in retrospect, they probably enhanced it. What might seem clunky and contrived at the start becomes contextual enrichment by the end. Reviewing the book now I realize that it is about so many things - Hamid does so much, so well. This is a love story and a political story. It is a farcical self-help book. It is a book about the notion of 'self', about how fast life moves and how critical it is to seize what is important to you when you have the time to do so. It is also a book about writing and creating fiction. All of this works to keep us readers distanced, to some degree, from the characters central to the Bildungsroman around which all of this is constructed. And yet by the end I was surprised at the extent of my engagement with that story. I was so engaged, in fact, that I was moved to tears by the final scenes.

This is such an original book and, mostly, it works. Hamid is a wonderful writer. I thought of the book several times during our travels, so it has stayed with me. I highly recommend it to anyone who enjoyed Adiga's White Tiger, to anyone who likes a good story told in a new voice, to anyone who enjoys a bit of politics spicing up their fiction.

Overall assessment: 4 out of 5 stars.

Favourite Passages: 'We are all refugees from our childhood. And so we turn, among other things, to stories. To write a story, to read a story, is to be a refugee from the state of refugees. Writers and readers seek a solution to the problem that time passes, that those who have gone are gone and those who will go, which is to say every one of us, will go. For there was a moment when anything was possible. And there will be a moment when nothing is possible. But in between we can create.'

'But when you read a book, what you see are black squiggles on pulped wood, or, increasingly, dark pixels on a pale screen. To transform these icons into characters and events, you must imagine. And when you imagine, you create. It's in being read that a book becomes a book, and in each of a million different readings a book becomes one of a million different books, just as an egg becomes one of potentially a million different people when it's approached by a hard-swimming and frisky school of sperm. Readers don't work for writers. They work for themselves. Therein, if you'll excuse the admittedly biased tone, lies the richness of reading.'

Sunday, January 5, 2014

On Meeting Margaret Atwood

I have such very sweet men in my life. My darling brother, in search of the perfect Christmas gift for me, asked Bibliohubby for advice and was told that a book was a no-fail idea. Not just any old book, mind you, but a special book by one of my favourite writers, a signed copy or a first edition (for those of you new to this space, I became a proper collector only quite recently, but I am a passionate one). Armed with this information, my brother started an internet search which led him to this golden nugget of information: Margaret Atwood was speaking and signing copies of her new book, Maddaddam, within easy driving distance of us both in November.  Apparently he then told his wife, my sister-in-law, that he had found the best present ever for me, and that he planned to attend the event by himself, buy a book and have Margaret Atwood sign it for me.

Umm...

Fortunately, his lovely wife is an eminently sensible person who pointed out to him that actually meeting Margaret Atwood might be more important to me than the book. She told him I would be mad if I found out that I had a chance to meet her and he hadn't told me (thanks SIL!). So... he told me, and my mum, and we all went along together one night in November to hear Ms Atwood speak.

I'll tell you a secret: I have actually heard her once before. She visited Kingston, Ontario when I was a student at Queen's University. But this was years ago - I won't tell you how many, it will date me.

I was very glad to see her again. Her wit is as sharp as I remembered. She is fiercely intelligent. She speaks quickly and with vigour and great humour. She said the MaddAddam trilogy was designed to be structured like a peace sign or a Mercedes symbol, meaning that the first two books sat apart but not chronologically - narratively. This third and final book is the thread that weaves the two stories together.  To me, this creative structuring is so original that it makes up for the fact that the sci-fi themes running through the books have been seen before in different iterations. I read a review recently (in the Guardian, of all places) to the effect that the trilogy was diverting and well-written, but that it was difficult to read it knowing that one might instead have been reading another book like Alias Grace or The Blind Assassin. In other words, he wishes Atwood would return to writing literary fiction, because he believe that to be a higher art form.

Well. I think Margaret Atwood has earned the right to write whatever she damn well pleases.

After the reading (which was fast-paced and funny - a great teaser for the book itself), I left the auditorium and joined the queue waiting to have my pre-purchased book signed. My brother - again proving his substantial worth - had left the reading a few minutes before, to relieve me of a fussy Miss Lulu, and managed to get in line early so that I had only minutes to wait before presenting my title page for signing.

And then I introduced myself to Margaret Atwood (!) and asked her this question: "If you were publishing for the first time today, would you publish electronically?"

We spoke for some time, enough time that the people behind me in line grew agitated. She said that yes, absolutely, she would have done that - as a teenager, for practice, in a safe space like Wattpad. She said that back then there was no such useful forum to test one's skills, to gain feedback that allowed one to improve as a writer.

But whether she would publish a novel electronically, rather than through a publisher? She wouldn't commit, but she seemed doubtful. "It's difficult to say what I might have done," she eventually said. Inferring: had times been different.

Quite apart from the thrill of meeting Ms Atwood itself, and engaging her sufficiently to have a brief one-on-one conversation, I also found that I completely agreed with both of her sentiments - her enthusiasm for electronic publishing as a testing ground for young new writers, and her obvious reluctance to embrace it as the model for more serious publishing. We may both be proved wrong on the latter point, of course, time will tell.

Let me take a moment, here, to publicly thank my brother for this amazing experience. And I will report back later this year when I have read the book.

Saturday, January 4, 2014

Piper Kerman - Orange is the New Black

This is a rare occasion. I am forced to admit that I read this book because I first saw the TV show, rather than the other way around. I KNOW. I surprised myself, too.

The show is really great, filled with strong female characters and peppered with laugh-out-loud humour. The book is an interesting read, but obviously - because it's REAL - it lacks Hollywood finesse. Piper is not as innocent or as beautiful as her television self, her ex-girlfriend isn't a hot, glowering sexual nemesis, and the other characters lack the charm delivered by the small screen. It's a memoir. If you want more of what the TV show provides, reading this book will not fulfill that need.

For those of you who haven't yet accessed this show on Netflix (and if you haven't, go and do it right now!), this is the true story of a white, middle class, educated woman in her 30s who is sentenced to a year in jail for a drug offence she committed during a post-college experimental phase ten years earlier. Piper is sent to a low security facility, leaving behind her fiancé, her friends and her family. Her memoir is fascinating because she doesn't fit the mould of what we imagine a typical prison-inmate to be. This won't be a surprise to anyone, but most of the female prison population - as described by Kerman, anyway - is made up of low-income, uneducated women of colour. Not because white educated women do not commit crimes, but because for various reasons they tend not to be incarcerated for those crimes as often as their less privileged sisters. As an educated, middle-class reader myself (clearly the type of reader Kerman expected / hoped to attract), it is easy to identify with Piper, and therefore to share her discomfort as she ekes out an existence in such foreign surroundings. It is easy, shall we say, to imagine that we might one day fall subject to the same fate, and that is a scary thought. It makes the read exciting, in some voyeuristic kind of way.

Kerman's anger at the inherent injustices of the current prison system and the lack of equality in the way women from different backgrounds are treated shines through much of her writing. She clearly intends for this to be a polemic of sorts, to make people in broader America aware of the absurdity of a system where low-income women consistently do serious time for petty crime at a heavy cost to the tax-payer, frequently becoming institutionalized and therefore ceasing being able to function as citizens upon release. In order to shore up her argument in this regard, Kerman drops frequent statistics into the narrative. I admire her social conscience but it changes the tone of the book and the statistics are presented without adequate citations or sociological context. Because she tries to write both a diverting narrative and a social diatribe, she ends up doing neither well. As a result of the frequent statistics, the story gets bogged down and there were times when I was bored. Yet the book alone is not sufficiently researched to stand alone as a treatise on the prison system in the United States.

The TV version of Kerman's book makes a social statement without statistics, by providing back story for the characters who are Kerman's fellow inmates, and revealing the hardships that have landed them in their current position. The viewers sympathize with and grow attached to these characters who are merely peripheral in the book. The effectiveness of the show lies in its ability to make viewers laugh at Piper's naiveté and the juxtaposition of her home life against her prison life whilst simultaneously moving us with poignant moments of sadness and futility.

Kerman talks about her fellow inmates in the book, too, but it is generally done from the standpoint of her relationship with them. She doesn't focus enough on describing each of the characters she introduces so that they are distinguishable from one another by name. I often felt quite lost when she referred back to one or other of them.

I did enjoy the way that Kerman's vocabulary and mode of speech changes throughout the book so that by the end it's clear she has evolved as a person during her time behind bars. And I think the story itself is compelling and quite horrifying. It's certainly worth a read, but if you were choosing between the book and the TV show, I would say the TV show is the more enjoyable form of the story (although obviously the book is the more authentic, and it depends what you are after).

Overall assessment: 2.5 out of 5.






Wednesday, January 1, 2014

2013 End of Year Book Survey



So you've seen which books I read this year, but I haven't written yet about the best books of 2013, my personal favourite books of 2013, what books I'm looking forward to for 2014, or any other typical end-of-year book blog fare. I kept coming up with different angles for these end-of-year posts, so instead of writing five different entries I decided to join in the 2013 survey created by Jamie over at The Perpetual Page Turner (thanks Jamie!). Jamie created the questions four years ago and now conducts this survey annually herself, inviting any interested book bloggers to participate.

1. Best book you read in 2013?

Hm, tough one. Probably May We Be Forgiven by A. M. Homes.

2. Book you were excited about and thought you were going to love more but didn't?

The Interestings, by Meg Wolitzer. I had read such great reviews about it that I personally recommended it for book club. But it did not live up to those reviews, not even close. If it wasn't for the fact that I wanted to review it here on the blog I might not have finished it. I read other disappointing books this year but none that I was as excited about prior to reading.

3. Most surprising (in a good way!) book you read in 2013?

May We Be Forgiven. I hadn't heard much about it, just picked it up in a bookstore and thought it looked good. It was a game changer for me, in the sense that I now want to read everything else she's written.

4. Book you read in 2013 that you recommended most in 2013?

Easy - The Rosie Project by Graeme Simsion. It's such a well-written, feel good novel, with hilarity and emotional resonance to boot. There are very few people to whom I would not recommend this.

5. Best series you read in 2013?

It's relatively rare for me to read series, so it is with surprise that I realize I have a ready answer for this one: the Patrick Melrose novels by Edward St Aubyn.

6. Favourite new author discovered in 2013?

Either A. M. Homes or Jennifer Egan.

7. Best book that was out of your comfort zone or was a new genre for you?

I read more non-fiction this year than I anticipated, but I would probably say Death Comes to Pemberley, a crime novel, was the greatest departure from my norm.

8. Most thrilling, unputdownable book of 2013?

Oh, it would have to be Gone Girl. Although strictly speaking I read it the first time towards the end of 2012.

9. Book you read in 2013 that you are most likely to re-read next year?

I don't really do this (unless I have to for book club). I would re-read a classic, or I might re-read a book that I loved years later - but almost never the very next year. I believe that the joy in returning to a book derives from the changes within oneself, and a year is not long enough to evoke changes in me significant enough that they would cause me to see a book in a new, interesting way.

10. Favourite cover of a book you read in 2013?

This is difficult, especially as I purchased many of my 2013 books electronically. I think the Faber & Faber cover of Deborah Levy's Swimming Home is beautiful. I also love the book covers created for the Patrick Melrose novels in the MacMillan box set. They are pleasantly tactile, too.

11. Most memorable character in 2013?

Probably Patrick Melrose, simply because I spent so much time with him. But Don Tillman, the professor at the core of The Rosie Project, is also highly memorable.

12. Most beautifully written book in 2013?

Tinkers by Paul Harding. Which is quite something, as I also re-read The Great Gatsby this year.

13. Book that had the greatest impact on you in 2013?

May We Be Forgiven, by A. M. Homes.

14. Book you can't believe you waited UNTIL 2013 to finally read?

I didn't read a book this year that neatly fits into this category. No classics that I should have read ages ago but just read this year for the first time. I suppose I had been wanting to read A Visit from the Goon Squad all through 2012 but only got to it in 2013, so perhaps that counts.

15. Favourite passage / quote from a book you read in 2013?

I couldn't possibly pull out a passage and say it was my favourite out of all 40 books. So I will just set out a couple of excerpts which I had highlighted on my Kindle app this year and which I found beautiful and touching.

From Me and Rory MacBeath by Richard Beasley:

"When 'Forever Young' came on, Harry and Ruth started singing along, and although I couldn't see, I was pretty sure Harry was crying when she was singing it. Towards the end of the song I remembered when it was that I'd last seen Rory smile, really smile, before this night. There he was, grabbing my leg at Brown's Beach, breaking the surface of the water, grinning and laughing like a madman. That had been the last time. Then I thought about how much had happened since that day, and I realized then, for the first time, that the song was really just a prayer, and I felt sad, as sad as Harry's voice, because I couldn't see how anyone could really stay forever young."

From May We Be Forgiven byA. M. Homes:

"What I have learned this year is that the job of parent is to help the child become the person he or she already is."

16. Shortest and longest book you read in 2013?

No idea, can't be bothered to look through them all to find out. Doesn't matter, really, does it, the length of a book?

17. Book that had a scene in it that had you reeling and dying to speak to someone about it?

THAT scene in Mateship With Birds - anyone who has read it will know what I mean. But also, on a more innocent note, the scene in The Rosie Project where Don is the cocktail mixer at the medical convention dinner. It had me laughing till I cried. Oh, also - the way The Dinner unfolds is so brilliant, I kept pressing the book on friends so I could talk to them about it.

18. Favourite relationship from a book you read in 2013?

The relationship between the professor and the housekeeper's son in The Housekeeper and the Professor. Closely followed by the relationship between Jake and his mother, Harry, in Richard Beasley's Me and Rory MacBeath.

19. Favourite book you read in 2013 by an author you have read previously?

Eve in Hollywood by Amor Towles, who also wrote Rules of Civility. Closely followed by How to get Filthy Rich in Rising Asia by Mohsin Hamid.

20. Best book you read in 2013 based SOLELY on a recommendation from someone else?

So many! I received great reading recommendations in 2013 and much of my reading was inspired by those recommendations. Where'd You Go, Bernadette by Maria Semple; The Rosie Project; The Women in Black by Madeleine St John, the Patrick Melrose novels. All great books. Thanks, bookish friends, for your excellent recommendations!


21. Genre you read the most in 2013?

Literary fiction.

22. Newest fictional crush from a book in 2013?

Mindy Kaling. Ok, she may be an actual real-life person but I'm sure there is some degree of fiction in her depiction on the page.

23. Best 2013 debut you read?

The Rosie Project.


24.  Most vivid world / imagery from a book you read in 2013?

I didn't read any sci-fi or young adult fiction this year, the kinds of books where this kind of thing is particularly relevant. The colours and sounds of Pakistan jumped off the page in How to Get Filthy Rich in Rising Asia, though.

25. Book that was the most fun to read in 2013?

The Rosie Project, Where'd you go, Bernadette, Is Everyone Hanging Out Without Me.

26. Book that made you cry or nearly cry in 2013?

I cry frequently, so don't place too much importance on this. I do remember distinct teary moments during my readings of May We Be Forgiven, The Rosie Project, Where'd You Go, Bernadette? and Me and Rory MacBeath. They were all different kinds of tears though - happy tears, sad-for-a-character tears, sad-to-finish-a-book tears, angry tears.

27. Book you read in 2013 that you think got overlooked this year or when it first came out?

The Women in Black, a book about Sydney in the 1950s, was first published in 1993 to little fanfare (although Madeleine St John became the first Australian female writer to be shortlisted for the Booker Prize for a subsequent novel in 1997). I feel as though she should have received greater critical acclaim for this comic little novel.





1. What is one book you didn't get to in 2013 but will be your top priority for 2014?

Timbuktu by Paul Auster. I didn't read a single of his books this year (save for excerpts from a book of letters exchanged between Auster and J. M. Coetzee), and I have this sitting unread on my shelf. I can't wait to crack it open.

2. Book you are most anticipating for 2014 (non-debut)?

The Invention of Wings by Sue Monk Kidd.

3. 2014 debut you are most anticipating?

Umm. Not sure.

4. Series ending you are most anticipating in 2014?

I am not reading a series where the last book is yet to emerge. But I am yet to read the final book of the Patrick Melrose series, titled At Last, so I suppose that is the ending I am most anticipating for 2014. Oh also, I have Margaret Atwood's Maddaddam on the shelf and am very much looking forward to reading this. I might have to re-read The Year of The Flood first, though.

5. One thing you hope to accomplish in your reading / blogging in 2014?

I would like to read more books this year, if it is possible, and to maintain consistency in my blogging. I need to make a list of all the books I want to read this year, because I keep stumbling across them and I'm worried now I will forget them all before the year is up.

Happy 2014 everyone! Here's to a brand new year of reading.

Bibliofilly x