The Reluctant Fundamentalist

I'm in a neighborhood women's book club. The Reluctant Fundamentalist, by Mohsin Hamid, was a book club pick.

I keep re-writing this post to describe the book, but I didn't think much of it and have decided not to bother you with a plot summary and instead just note its style.

It's written as a monologue by a Pakistani man speaking to an American (who may or may not be carrying a gun; who may/may not be CIA; may/may not be trying to assassinate him) in a cafe in Pakistan.

The narrator occasionally notices and comments on the American's discomfort: "I see this makes you tense..." In my head, the Pakistani narrator was speaking English with a bad accent (since I can't do accents). Partly because of the bad accent, partly because of the discomfort of the American, partly because of the verbosity and creepiness of the narrator, I kept being reminded of Christopher Walken's Saturday Night Live character, the Continental. That pretty much ruined the suspense the novel promised to deliver.