NovelWorld

I had high hopes from the beginning for Mohsid Hamid’s new novel, THE RELUCTANT FUNDAMENTALIST ($22). I was intrigued by the title. I was grabbed by the cover. Then I read the first paragraph and was hit by a wave of deja-vu.

No lover of French literature can fail to recognize the unmistakable beginning of that classic oddity, Albert Camus’s unique, intriguing short novel, THE FALL ($10.95).

LA CHUTE is written in direct address to the reader, as though the author is talking straight to you, one-on-one. The narrator runs into you in Amsterdam, and offers to help you in a bar confusingly named Mexico City, volunteering to translate since the sinister “ape” who runs the place speaks only Dutch. Then over the course of the next few days, Jean-Baptiste Clamence, formerly a well-known lawyer in Paris, tells you how he fell from grace in a moral crisis from which he’s never recovered.

Like Camus, Mohsin Hamid has his narrator speak directly to the reader, inviting him into a personal conversation that gets out of hand. This time the story is told by Changez, a bright, cocky young Pakistani scholar who graduates from Princeton and lands a high-flying, cutthroat New York job. Then 9/11 changes the world and his life.

Hamid cleverly transforms Camus’s “primate” running the Mexico City bar into a sinister waiter in a Lahore teashop with motives of his own.

But Hamid’s razor-sharp little thriller goes one step farther than Camus’s framework. Though the narrator in THE RELUCTANT FUNDAMENTALIST seems to be talking directly to the reader, you soon realize the American he’s addressing has his own background and motives. Who’s deceiving who is the question, as this examination of an immigrant’s conscience in the wake of 9/11 turns into an uneasy chess game between Changez and the American, between author and reader.

The plot is economical. Not a word is wasted. The two secondary characters are swiftly-drawn, subtle, and lifelike. The tension is expertly cranked up, the political vision is concise and devastating. Changez asks a few blisteringly hot questions about the American response to 9/11. The narrator’s slightly-mocking tone of sincerity slowly becomes unnerving.

I can’t help but notice that this timely little critique of American foreign policy is opening, after one week of sales, at No. 6 on The New York Times bestseller list. Sorta gives me the feeling that maybe a few Americans out there are interested in alternative, outsider opinions.

Hamid isn’t the only one inspired by Camus these days.

Like Camus, Yasmina Khadra is passionately engaged with the modern world. Like Camus, he’s also an Algerian who went to France to create his literary masterpieces. Both of Khadra’s last two novels, THE ATTACK ($13.95) and THE SIRENS OF BAGHDAD ($19.95), echo Camus’s masterpiece, THE PLAGUE ($16), where literature is a battleground of ideas, where characters represent opposing philosophical positions.

Hamid and Khadra have something else in common. Both THE SIRENS OF BAGHDAD and THE RELUCTANT FUNDAMENTALIST are attempting to show the West what turns good young men into terrorists. Hamid and Khadra are both fiercely objective reporters on the human condition. Both men place an undefeatable existential value on human dignity, while still daring to depict life the way it really is.

Khadra paints the big picture from multiple angles. Hamid makes it close and personal.

Welcome to a new world of terrorism, where nothing is what it seems, where subtle prejudices lurk behind professional smiles. Hamid’s crafty little tour de force is a literary tightrope act, a narrative laced with ambiguity and lies that can literally be read in two different ways.

Have a seat. Changez would like to have a word with you.

The minute it arrived in the bookstore, I dropped the other book I was reading.

It’s a riveting, anxiety-inducing portrait of Iraq told by an unnamed young man in a remote Iraqi village. He’s just an ordinary kid who squeezed in one month at the university in Baghdad before the war broke out and he had to go home. He’s not a resistance fighter, not anyone special, a shy, emotional, religious kid who loves his family and believes in honor. With him, you watch the smoke and fire and helicopters and gunfire getting closer and closer until the narrator and everything he knows in his village are swept up in the invasion.

The novel chronicles the transformation of this gentle boy into someone completely else. It starts the day he’s forced to drive an injured friend to the only medical clinic on the other side of a military check-point. This harrowing sequence is followed by one of those all-too-common house searches, just the standard operating procedure, nothing too unusual for these wartorn days in Iraq, just angry Gis with guns shouting at his family, roughing them up a bit. All pretty much daily occurrences.

That’s all it takes to change this guy forever.

No one’s seriously hurt, no one’s raped, no bones are broken, just degraded a little, but something happens that pushes him over the edge. I mean, permanently over. I’ll never tell, but I’ll say it’s a cultural factor I knew nothing about, a value I was as totally unaware of as the GIs, a cultural chasm I didn’t even know existed.

That cultural ignorance is decisive, irreversible, and life-destroying.

That the plot hinges on this event is just one of the book’s many surprises. You watch in horror as the boy you care about becomes a dangerous someone else, a walking zombie who starts having frightening blank-out moments.

Besides the book’s topicality and authenticity, there’s Khadra’s breathtaking writing. Set-ups so cleverly introduced you’re constantly surprised that you already know exactly what you need to know to understand a scene. He’s extremely skillful at disguising plot points, introducing them without a ripple. Later, when the emotional payoff hits you with a wallop, you realize you’re in the hands of a subtle, cunning storyteller as well as a morally-outraged human being.

I call the author Yasmina Khadra. That’s his wife’s name. His real name is Mohammed Moulessehoul. Since he was an officer in the Algerian military, his writings were subject to censorship, so he used her name to get his first novels printed and has kept it ever since.

He now writes in France, just like his Algerian forebear, Albert Camus, to whom Khadra bears a growing resemblance.

Frankly, I wasn’t too crazy about the first Khadra book I read. I encountered his short novel, THE SWALLOWS OF KABUL ($12), right on the tail of Khaled Hosseini’s history-making, David Lean-like production, THE KITE RUNNER ($14). Khadra’s unpleasant little tragedy is so humorless and oppressive, with such an overwhelming downer of an ending that, well, I sorta hated it, to be frank. I’ve come to respect it more later, with mixed feelings.

It was the second novel I read by Khadra that blew me out of the water. THE ATTACK ($13.95) is about an Arab surgeon in Israel, a doctor so dedicated that when a man on the operating table spits in his face, he goes on operating. The novel begins when the good doctor is summoned to the hospital to find out that the wife he adores has been killed in a terrorist bombing. Horrible enough, but to make matters nightmarish: she was the terrorist.

How could the woman he loved have committed an act he abhors? You’ll want to accompany this grieving man as he flings caution to the wind and goes recklessly in search of the answer he can’t live without knowing – what made his wife do this thing? You’ll hear every point of view on the act of suicide bombing. Khadra doesn’t judge them. He leaves that to you.

As fine as THE ATTACK is, THE SIRENS OF BAGHDAD is even better, with a stronger plot building to a white-knuckled final third. Khadra’s writing is inflamed with a serious moral authority, the most tragic sequences have a lyrical dignity, and the frightening young man telling the story never quite loses his humanity. The crime-infested streets of Baghdad are truly terrifying. The plot feels dreadfully possible. The ending will leave you shaken and touched.

As far as I’m concerned, Yasmina Khadra has just joined the international masters standing in line for the Nobel Prize.

What am I doing in this armchair?

I’ve just turned down an invitation to go out for a beer tonight. Why? Because I’m so caught up in Javier Cercas’ exciting new novel, just published as a paperback original, THE SPEED OF LIGHT ($14.95). It’s living up to all my expectations, this unexpected and unsettling Spanish take on the Vietnam War.

It’s about a grad student in Barcelona who gets an assistant professor post at the University of Illinois at Urbana, where he shares an office with a complex and embittered Vietnam vet. When his office mate disappears – and Rodney Falk is a fascinating guy – the unnamed narrator goes in search of him to the little town where Rodney lives with his Dad.

Part Two has the Dad summoning the narrator back out to his house. He’s got a story to tell, a dreadful tale of his sons in Vietnam. And he doesn’t know the whole story, either. Not until Rodney’s wife fills in a few more pieces of the puzzle does it come together. But filling in puzzles is what author Cercas does best. You feel compelled to find out why Rodney Falk is the way he is, because what you’ve already learned has been increasingly heartbreaking. But fascinating! The whole investigation is written in a cool non-fiction style, utterly believable, blurring fiction with the author’s real-life sojourn at the University of Illinois, where he wrote a novel which appears in this novel, until there’s no telling where to draw the line between memoir, novel, and reality.

The only other book by Cercas available in translation in the United States is SOLDIERS OF SALAMIS ($14.95), a similarly hyper-realistic recreation of a moment in wartime. In this case, the kernel of the story is an unforgettable moment that the reader comes back to in the novel again and again: a fascist bad guy manages to escape from a mass execution at the end of the Spanish Civil War. A pursuing soldier finds him, locks eyes with him, holds him at gunpoint, and lets him live.

Out of this incident Cercas creates a fascinating fictional research project to make history surrender its secrets. Part One shows the author unearthing the incident, with a little help from his girlfriend. Part Two is the biography of the fascist who walked away from the firing squad alive. Part Three is the author’s attempt to find the soldier who spared his life, in a search through all the nursing homes of France. It all turns into a subtle, smart meditation on war, memory, and fiction writing. When they finally find the old guy who could really be the one, the story soars into genius, saving the most delightful character in the novel for last.

Cercas is tough and unsentimental, but his droll faux-honesty and witty smarts make him a sheer pleasure to read.

SOLDIERS OF SALAMIS is a hard act to follow, and THE SPEED OF LIGHT is every bit as good. And even more disturbing, because we’re not talking about the Spanish Civil War here, we’re talking about us, the American debacle seen by a non-American, a war that defined a generation, a war in which almost sixty thousand soldiers died, most of them boys of twenty, and ten times more bombs were dropped than on all of Europe during the Second World War.

The perfect setting for a morally-murky, complicated puzzle of a tragedy.