Throughout this reading, it is interesting how the author, Mohsin Hamid, interweaves the notion of war and decay. It seems every moment of inspection within the book, Hamid injects a bit of darkness within as if he wants the readers to have an underlying tone of instability while reading this book. Something that would take one off guard would be this line in the book, “such that Nadia and her family both considered her thereafter to be without a family, something all of them, all four, for the rest of their lives, regretted, but which none of them would ever act to repair, partly out of stubbornness, partly out of bafflement at how to go about doing so, and partly because the impending descent of their city into the abyss would come before they realized that they had lost the chance.”(Hamid 22) Even when discussing family and the difficulties of fixing the stresses and tensions within family ties, Hamid tells the readers that there isn’t any real point of trying to mend anything because the destruction of their lives is nigh. These Nihlisitc attributes are very interesting and I wonder how Hamid will play with that and other rhetorical devices as the book continues.
It’s perplexing how Hamid made Saeed racist. There is a point in the book where he talks about his distaste for Filipinos. (I personally don’t see how this can contribute or add on to the story but I wonder if these details are even necessary. Perhaps Hamid is setting up for a scene further down the book where the character Saeed realizes that Filipinos and himself are on the same level).