Wednesday, June 05, 2013

The Reluctant Fundamentalist

So, I heard an NPR story a few weeks back about this movie, The Reluctant Fundamentalist, which is soon out, based on a book by the same name. It sounded like a bit of a think-piece/thriller with international diplomacy overtones. Right up my alley!

The next day I saw the book for a dollar at the used book store. I finished it this afternoon.

The book itself was disappointing. The author can turn a phrase and it's interesting enough, but there wasn't the kind of pay-off I expected.

Basically, it's the story of a young Pakistani man who goes to Princeton and becomes a financial analyst in New York and his ultimate disillusion with American life.

If you can get past the often idiotic tropes (the dynamic main character is named "Changez," I kid you not), the core story is, like the Hobbit, one of there and back again. The strangeness of American individualism after a lifetime of group culture and socialization, the freedom and enjoyment of independence and liberty, followed by the hollow emptiness of the same.

The story serves, for most of the novel, as a great picture of the costs and benefits to our compartmentalized modern, western lives. There's a lot of good stuff there to both think on and discuss.

Towards the end, there is a fantastic quote:


Such journeys have convinced me that it is not always possible to restore one's boundaries after they have been blurred and made permeable by a relationship: try as we might, we cannot reconstitute ourselves as the autonomous beings we previously imagined ourselves to be.

At some point, as we seek to self-determine our future, we encounter the limitations of such a personal vision. I'm sure there's an equivalent in Pakistani society or anywhere else - it's not necessarily an American or Western phenomenon. In the end, we are in this thing together, whether we like it or not.

We are not just whole people (with permeable barriers between our physical, spiritual, work, home, school, family, private, and public lives), but we are part of a larger whole. The "fundamentals" in the title refer to the essential parts of a project or a person or a culture, the things that make it real.

In the midst of a world obsessed with every detail but the fundamental ones, there is a yearning for something different. I'm not sure what the book was trying to say in the end - I'm not sure there was ever any revelation of true fundamentals - but I do believe they're out there and they have to do with more than individual or cultural or political identities.

I can't say it any better than the quote does - so here it is again:


Such journeys have convinced me that it is not always possible to restore one's boundaries after they have been blurred and made permeable by a relationship: try as we might, we cannot reconstitute ourselves as the autonomous beings we previously imagined ourselves to be.

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