How To Get Filthy Rich In Rising Asia, by Mohsin Hamid, is much concerned with communion between the
writer, and the reader: “Like all books, this self-help book is a
co-creative project…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…”
Fine. But does that deny that an
author has in her mind, when she writes, some meaning she intends to convey to
her readers? Can readers misinterpret those meanings? If I had read How To Get Filthy Rich In Rising
Asia as a guide to getting on in the world, and not as, in part, a commentary on both guides to getting on in the world, and also the whole idea of getting on in the world, would Mohsin Hamid have had a
right to irritation?
How interesting you find such
questions will probably partly determine how much you enjoy How To Get
Filthy Rich In Rising Asia, as will how you
feel about the fact that Hamid asks you, the reader, to participate in his
novel as “you”, his unnamed main character, even though you are no freer to
invent “your” biography than you are to interpret How To Get Filthy Rich In
Rising Asia as a self-help book, since
Hamid has done (most of) the inventing for you.
You are born dirt poor somewhere in
rural “rising Asia.” (Where’s that?) As a youth you hanker after both love and
money, though the self-help guide you're following / that's following you advises that if you want
filthy riches, then don’t fall in love. Nevertheless, you tumble. Your heart’s
target is “the pretty girl”, and
once you’ve seen her, your two stories begin a life-long intermingling. Your
target remains, to you, “the pretty girl”, even as she ages. When you look at
her in early middle age: “What you see is
a woman little changed by the years, not, obviously, because this is true, your
first meeting having been half your lifetimes ago, but rather because your
image of her is not entirely determined by her physical reality.” Eventually, you marry another woman, one you
cannot really see, so filled is your vision by the pretty girl, and with whom
you have a son: “Fatherhood has taught you the lesson that, even in
middle age, love is practicable. It is possible to adore those newly come into
your world, to envision, no matter how late in the day, a happily entwined
future with those who have not been part of your past.”
On the financial side, you scam,
cheat, bribe, and batter your way to riches. In old age you yourself are cheated, and you descend from the top of the money tree somewhere back towards
its middle.
How To Get Filthy Rich In Rising
Asia is challenging, playful, serious,
knowing, argumentative, upsetting and wonderful. It’s political, angry about
the conditions of the world’s poor, and it’s deft and touching in its treatment
of the personal. It’s filled with
sentences that demand rereading, as does the whole novel. I loved it.
How To Get Filthy Rich In Rising
Asia is published in the US by Riverhead Books, and in the UK by Hamish Hamilton. Depending where you are, you will
probably find both editions available in Asia – though of course more readily
available in risen Asia, than in either rising Asia, or in sinking Asia. It is available as an e-book.
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| UK edition |
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| US edition |
If you have read How To Get
Filthy Rich In Rising Asia, please post
with your opinions.
