Interposed reading: "How to Get Filthy Rich in Rising Asia" by Mohsin Hamid

A cheeky interloper, this book. I am currently embarked on a hefty historical novel, which, though admirable, is not a quick read. So when, serendipitously, this book, of which I had read complimentary reviews, presented itself on a bookshelf in Perugia's Feltrinelli (where else?), I was easily tempted. Three days later it was read and I am back to my historical novel.


This is a gem of a book, managing to be a quick and easy read, but at the same time profound and enlightening, full of life but with a tinge of melancholy. Hamid's technique is unusual. The story is about "you" - the reader - because the novel presents itself as a self-help manual, of the sort apparently very popular in Asia, advising the "you" of the story on how to get filthy rich. Each chapter brings new advice: starting with "Move to the City", through, for example, "Don't fall in love", "Work for yourself" to rather darker advice, such as "Be prepared to use violence" and "Befriend a bureaucrat". Of course, these are devices to tell the story of "your" life, from your squalid origins is what we assume to be rural Pakistan, through your huckstering rise in the megacity you make your home, to your ultimate separation from your wealth at the end of your life. 

I had often wondered how a second-person narration might work, and assumed it would quickly come to feel gimmicky. However, in Hamid's hands it works extremely well, making the anonymous hero of the novel at the same time highly personal and an everyman figure. We root for our hero, even when his rise in the world, after the lucky breaks of surviving childhood illness and being both male and the third child - which means he gets the chance to complete school - is built on dodgy dealing, most innocently pirated DVDs, later, food with "corrected" sell-by dates and boiled tap water sold as mineral water, and, later still, corrupt deals with shady gangland types and bent bureaucrats. We forgive him all of this because of his chutzpah, his energy, his real concern to look after family, friends and employees, and above all because of his resilient humanity in the face of a brutal and unforgiving world, the world of "rising Asia".

There is something of the moral fable about this book. Much of its morality is tied up in the relationship between the hero ("you") and the girl from the same neighbourhood known only ever as the "pretty girl" (even when an old lady), whose life parallels yours. Her break is to be pretty, her skill to exploit the fact to rise to fame and fortune as model, actress and TV personality. The two lives are played out distantly but alongside each other, intersecting occasionally and romantically, but only ever really coming together when the ascent to wealth and fortune is over and when driving material ambition is replaced by acceptance that life can have a downward trajectory as well as upward, and other things are as important. Does this sound a little trite? Possibly, but Hamid handles it with such subtlety and humanity that it genuinely doesn't feel that way.

There is a hint of "Slumdog Millionaire" about this, but this is not a story of extraordinary luck, but, one suspects, of slightly more ordinary, if not universal, luck, the sort of luck, which if multiplied over and over again produces a "rising Asia" and confronts countless individuals with the joys, conflicts and conundrums that "you" encounter in this clever and multi-layered novel.

Recommendation? Yep.