how to get filthy rich in rising asia characters

Hamid uses this structure to follow a particular character’s (rags-to-riches) story while at the same time exploring the social and economic context in which it takes place. The you of the book starts out as a young village boy from a poor family, and each chapter follows a key moment or decision in the boy’s life leading right up to his eventual death. It’s divided into twelve chapters titled things like Move to the City Get an Education Focus on the Fundamentals (a little shout-back to Reluctant there) Have an Exit Strategy. It works better than it sounds. This time the conceit is that it’s a self-help book, but a peculiarly specific one. How to get Filthy Rich in Rising Asia (my favourite book title in quite a while) is another second person novel. If you couldn’t every page would have another irritation. The use of the second person in Reluctant led to a few clumsy moments where the narrator had to say things that normally would be covered by descriptive text, but most of the time Hamid pulled it off and the result was a clever and engaging novel which read like a thriller but which glittered with intelligence and insight. One point I picked out specifically in my 2009 review was that you had to simply accept the narrative device embrace its artificiality.

Reluctant was a timely book, dealing with issues of radicalisation and globalisation, but what really made it stand out was Hamid’s unusual stylistic choice – the entire book was written in the second person, the reader taking the place of an unnamed American sitting in a cafe with the narrator. Mohsin Hamid came to international attention with his second novel, The Reluctant Fundamentalist. How To Get Filthy Rich In Rising Asia, by Mohsin Hamid

How to get filthy rich in rising asia characters