He Reminds Me of a Gentler Junot Diaz

There are writers who write about the banality of life, the shadow on a wall, the flooding of people out of the subway, the quotidian, incontrovertible state of life that we can all identify with at some point, and then there is Mohsin Mamid. For me, I haven't read enough to put him into a category, which made him all the more mysteriously intriguing.

I've finished all his books by far(How to Get Filthy Rich in Rising Asia, The Reluctant Fundamentalist and Moth Smoke), and I've found, shockingly, how many similarities he shares with another favorite writer of mine Junot Diaz: both immigrants, prestigious American schools educated, award winning writers, none of them were prolific, and most of all, they write about familiar territories, unattained love, identity crisis, immigration, as male writers, both create stereotypical female characters who serves as the staple of the protagonists' desire, lust, heart break, and the force that finally throw them off the edge.

It casts an interesting light on Pakistan’s rich and privileged, Daru Shezad, the protagonist with a self-destructive streak. As a wannabe, I couldn’t help but putting my own thoughts into the character development. I’ve gotten used to the ‘emotional justice’. Let the unattained love be attained, the good be rewarded, the rich and evil be punished. However, with the narrators constantly switching, some may argue it causes unnecessary clumsiness and confusion, for me, it’s difficult to put the pattern in, no matter how much I want to be sympathetic, and yearn for a different ending. Even more so, to take sides. It made me think of the nature of human beings, we are complicated and multi-faceted, and there is not even a fine line between being a saint or evil.