Last week, in an email a good friend informed me that he had finished reading Moshin Hamid's novel "A Reluctant Fundamentalist". To spike my interest, he also added that Mr. Hamid worked in the same kind of job I am currently employed in, and even more intriguingly for the very same firm in the 1999 - 2000-ish period, and that he had used the business world as seen through the context of this firm as an entry point for his novel.

The latter piece of news, for the obvious reasons, thrilled me quite a bit for it for it held out hope that I might still disentangle myself from the business of business, and transfer my complete allegiance to the country of writing. This also meant that I had to go to bookstore and discover what Mr. Hamid had to say in his book. However since I didn't go the big chain bookstore here, I couldn't lay my greedy hands on this novel. So in lieu of that I Googled Mr. Hamid, and ended up reading this essay he had written for the Asian edition of the Time Magazine. I felt a sudden kinship to Hamid when I read this passage:

"I think about why so many of my friends left Lahore and why so few of us returned. None of us seemed to think, at the time, that we were going away for good. The universities were in bad shape, and we went abroad for a better education. But as the economy stagnated and as law and order declined, we delayed our homecomings. We began to work. We began to settle into new lives. And as the years passed, it became harder and harder for us to think of what we would do if we went back to Lahore. The city changed and we changed, and somehow we became voluntary exiles. But at least in my case, the homesickness that resulted from exile, although not fatal, has remained uncured."

And I thought I had invented that set of words in bold! So kind reader, in revenge, Hamid's novels will now be hunted down by yours truly.

After a period of weeks when I picked up the newspaper to read in the loo, I was happy to be greeted by face of the brightest (imho) star of the Toronto's literary firmament, Michael Ondaatje, and the good news of a new novel by him, "Divisadero", being published here in Canada next week. Since the book won't be available in the US bookstores until next month, and in other countries months after that, I am secretly thrilled to be in Ondaatje's home city where I can lay my hands on his tasty writing way before anyone else I know. Meanwhile here is the interview, and an excerpt from the novel that I read with pleasure. And this is a juicy morsel for folks in hurry:

"I love the performance of a craft, whether it is modest or mean-spirited, yet I walk away when discussions of it begin — as if one should ask a gravedigger what brand of shovel he uses or whether he prefers to work at noon or in moonlight. I am interested only in the care taken, and those secret rehearsals behind it. Even if I do not understand fully what is taking place."

I am about to tell are shameless lies.

So proclaimed the creator of that zany religion "Bokononism", Kurt Vonnegut, in "Cat's Cradle". Consequently, when I when I read this post by a precocious reader of Vonnegut earlier during lunch today, my first reaction was that it may not be true at all, and that Vonnegut, like his most famous protagonist Billy Pilgrim, might just be tripping down into some parallel and weirdly macabre universe.

Vonnegut's work* was deeply appealing to the optimistic pessimist in me, who simultaneously believed that the world is going to hell in a hand basket in a minute as well as that life is beautiful, as I acclimatized and accultured to the weirdness of the New World subsequent to an arrival here some seven ago.

RIP Mr. Vonnegut. You have made a reader who is not interested in sci-fi read sci-fi that showed how real life is indeed worse (or weird) than any fiction a writer can dream about.

* This is a wonderful archive of his pieces, many of were part of his last book of non-fiction "A Man Without a Country"; re-reading some of which made me chuckle again, and say amen!