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    How to Get Filthy Rich in Rising Asia: A Novel
    Unavailable
    How to Get Filthy Rich in Rising Asia: A Novel
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    How to Get Filthy Rich in Rising Asia: A Novel
    Audiobook4 hours

    How to Get Filthy Rich in Rising Asia: A Novel

    Published by Penguin Random House Audio

    4/5

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    Currently unavailable

    Currently unavailable

    About this audiobook

    From the internationally bestselling author of The Reluctant Fundamentalist, the boldly imagined tale of a poor boy's quest for wealth and love.

    His first two novels established Mohsin Hamid as a radically inventive storyteller with his finger on the world's pulse. How to Get Filthy Rich in Rising Asia meets that reputation -- and exceeds it. The astonishing and riveting tale of a man's journey from impoverished rural boy to corporate tycoon, it steals its shape from the business self-help books devoured by ambitious youths all over "rising Asia." It follows its nameless hero to the sprawling metropolis where he begins to amass an empire built on that most fluid, and increasingly scarce, of goods: water. Yet his heart remains set on something else, on the pretty girl whose star rises along with his, their paths crossing and recrossing, a lifelong affair sparked and snuffed and sparked again by the forces that careen their fates along.

    How to Get Filthy Rich in Rising Asia is a striking slice of contemporary life at a time of crushing upheaval. Romantic without being sentimental, political without being didactic, and spiritual without being religious, it brings an unflinching gaze to the violence and hope it depicts. And it creates two unforgettable characters who find moments of transcendent intimacy in the midst of shattering change.

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherPenguin Random House Audio
    Release dateMar 5, 2013
    ISBN9781101605325
    Unavailable
    How to Get Filthy Rich in Rising Asia: A Novel

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    Reviews for How to Get Filthy Rich in Rising Asia

    4/5

    418 ratings65 reviews

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    • 5/5
      A novel written in second person and it works perfectly. A unique way to tell an intriguing story of a life.
    • 5/5
      What an absolutely marvelous book! It is funny, heart-breaking, but also deeply political. The ingenious structure adds a delightful element to the story. Highly recommended, especially if you are at all interested in semi-functioning states and love.
    • 5/5
      The story was great! The conflict was super dramatic yet the author maintained to depict it in a light, enjoyable language. M.H has a way with metaphors!
    • 4/5
      Really liked a lot. It starts out as a pretty funny snarky description of life as a struggling mini entrepreneur in India but gets more serious and more soulful as it goes on. Wonderful writing.
    • 3/5
      This is the third book by this author for me. I would not say he is a favorite author and this would be the least favorite. It is, however, an interesting book in that it is designed in the format of self help book and follows the life of a poor boy to corporate business man.The man is never named. I did not appreciate the sexual descriptions and often this is what I really disliked about many of these Asian works.
    • 3/5
      [uncorrected proof] while it took a while for me to adjust to the second person, I liked the writing style and found it easy to read - curious if translated; contains just the right touch of humor and sadness; unnamed main character becomes a "corporate tycoon" yet I never got that feel - was I supposed to? or was he simply unpretentious?; I don't know why, but I pictured Chinese characters; good book club discussions here (I have a feeling my review will be different if I read it a second time)
    • 4/5
      I've read Mohsin Hamid's novel The Reluctant Fundamentalist, and I really enjoyed the unique point of view in that novel (written from the point of view of a terrorist addressing a foreigner). This novel is similarly unique. It is written in a second-person point of view, which has the effect of drawing the reader into the story as a participant. I enjoyed this very much, though I still think The Reluctant Fundamentalist is better.
    • 4/5
      I liked the use of no names - made the book seem much more universal. It is not the best book I have read about Asia, corruption, family etc but it improved and the ending was pretty good.
    • 5/5
      The opportunities, challenges and choices involved in being an entrepreneur in the third world, half-parodically clothed as a self help book. We meet a You that is guided through how to succeed moneywise, which also carries with it successes and failures of other kinds.
    • 4/5
      I loved how this was written. In second person (written to "you"), this novel is written as a self-help book. Through this self-help book, tells the story of a young boy born into poverty who wants to get filthy rich. The reader is never told any names of any of the people...I love it when an author does something interesting and new.
    • 5/5
      Even after reading raving reviews I didn't think I wanted to read this book as I thought the title was cynical and figured the entire book would be just a cynical and sharp attack on capitalism and any one's desire to "get ahead." I was wrong. Thankfully, a reading friend brought the book to me and said "read this." I must admit, it took me just a bit to get into the format of the writer addressing "you". It takes a very skilled writer to be able to pull this off with interest, humor, a splash of pathos leaving the reader plenty to think about.I assumed that the "self-help" format of this book would be one of a modern style of writing with bullets, short paragraphs, e-mails, tweets, etc. Seems more and more writers are taking this type of approach. However, this reads like a novel; there isn't any of that quirky stylistic writing. The sentences make sense; the author uses the correct punctuation including quotation marks (another thing that seems to be going by the wayside of many modern writers), and it has great chapter titles. Yes, the narrator is talking to "you", but that works.I loved this story. There is just something about it that will remain with me. Yes, it is set in "rising Asia" somewhere and I don't know who "you" is. But there is something very universal about "you." What does it really take to rise from poverty to worldly riches? What role does family play in our lives? How much would we sacrifice for wealth? What does it mean to be rich? Is that different than "filthy rich"?Many commented that the "you" in the story is not very likable. True, but he is certainly believable. And, the ending demonstrates that he must have dome something right along the way. Life is complicated and perhaps even more so in a complicated society of ancient Asia entering a highly technical and modern world. This novels paints a picture of that complication. Furthermore, the use of the water industry as the main character's path to riches was brilliant. Gives the reader plenty to think about.
    • 3/5
      To my amazement, I disliked this book. As a former business reporter who typically enjoys books about self-made business tycoons, I was eager to read a fictional work that was shaped as a how-to/self-help book. What a creative concept, I thought. Unfortunately, I have to agree with an earlier reviewer who described Hamid's work as "ordinary and boring." I found the characters one-dimensonal and the book largely devoid of any "wow factors." A week after reading it, I could barely remember many details. Give the author an "A" for hitting on an inventive storytelling technique. Give Hamid a "D" for delivering a compelling yarn.
    • 4/5
      This was a self-help book of a most unique kind. It was also a love story. It was a story of success and the eventual fall from success. It was a glimpse into the cultural realm of a poverty stricken country's citizens, trying by whatever means necessary, to dig their way out of the pervasive poverty that surrounds them. It was strange, it was insightful and I liked it.
    • 3/5
      Started out really great.The second person narrative works surprisingly well although the books slowed down by the end and became a bit of a drag so I couldn't finish it.It starts with you being sick in a remote village and chronicles your rise to riches and then the fall.Also throw in a love interest which was a terrible side plot and you have an ok novel.
    • 3/5
      Interesting variation on the theme of self help. Somewhat reminded me of " Lost in the Cosmos: The Last Self-Help Book" by Walker Percy, another odd take on a self help book.
    • 4/5
      This book was cleverly written and engaging. I would give it 4.5 stars.
    • 5/5
      How To Get Filthy Rich in Rising Asia is an intelligent , insightful and gripping read. In many ways the title and cover of the book are a disservice to this wonderful read. One could be forgiven for assuming that this is a non- fiction book about how to get rich. Instead, this is a story about an a young boy growing up in an impoverished rural family in Pakistan. The bright, unnamed second person narrator is able to get a basic education unlike most of his peers. As an avid reader a particular quotation stood out to me. While watching the credits roll at the end of a TV movie, he realizes " Your mother sees a meaningless stream of hieroglyphs. Your father and and sister make out an occasional number, your brother that and the occasional word. For you alone does this part of the programming make sense. You understand who is responsible for what." p 33 The story follows our narrator from his babyhood, through his ambition and struggle with his integrity to become rich. As readers we are with him even in his old age. Along the way , he encounters gangs, government corruption and violence. But this tale is so much more than an intriguing look at the challenges in life in contemporary Lahore, Pakistan. This is also a romance, and a man struggling with his conscience and obligations to his family. Tightly written, unsentimental , and well worth the read. Highly recommended. 4. 5 stars
    • 3/5
      Audible, read by the author. This gave an interesting sense of how he sees his book. I ended up liking this book a lot. This is probably a 3.5. Written in second person. Covers a long life in Pakistan. Would recommend.
    • 4/5
      I'm vacillating between 3 and 4 stars. There were moments in this book that were wonderful and beautiful. On the other hand, the 2nd person voice was a little odd and in many ways made it difficult to connect to the "characters." It was an overall enjoyable and inventive read.
    • 3/5
      It's a bit hard to review this without feeling ungenerous to it because the authorial persona that emerges (NB, it can do so every bit as fully and vividly from a novel whose protagonist is an unnamed "you" as opposed to an unnamed "I") is so polished, self-aware, and cynical. Hamid knows very well that he is selling voyeurism, the appearance but not the reality of satire, and non-specifically "Asian" and "mongrel" (the neoliberal riposte to Bhabha's "hybrid") quick reads immersed in a vaguely oily realism-with-capitalist-characteristics: literature genetically engineered for Economist readers. It's about one abject boy predator but with a good heart and of course a dream, and you hope for something brittle and incisive beneath all the surface unction, the performance of a willingness to perform social commentary at some nonspecified future date, but it leaves you feeling ungenerous as well, like, reducing it to something ridiculous like a well-timed attempt to piggyback off Slumdog Millionaire, which, like, "rising Asia" is perhaps a little more than that but it doesn't matter because the representative choices Hamid makes (in re open toilets, for example, in re the young gunman kissing his mother and sister goodbye) seem to betray a sanguinity on his part with paying for the emotional charge by laying himself open to the charge of exploitation (though, he always seems to imply, self-exploitation, the rich kid from Pakistan well used to playing racial Other in creative writing programs for rich kids from the US and in, like, Granta). Are you recognizing the complex but utterly tiresome act I am referring to?And so it is a bit surprising when you come to recognize that this is actually a love story, and a very sweet one, wrapped up as all love stories are with life arc and death in a way that, let me leave aside my own cynic's pose for a minute, is simply unglamorous and therefore seems sincere. I really liked reading about the hungry boy and the pretty girl, and if all throughout Hamid does not seem quite confident to lay aside the glibly marketable reflexivity ("I within you within me, though not in a creepy way"), I still kind of feel like the quieter story of love half enacted, the ephemeralness of gold, physical decline, etc., emerges from the other like a cool shaded room in a twenty-first-century megalopolis full of traffic and billboards and guys on the make, and makes this (quick!) read worth a moyen of one's time, in an airport, say.
    • 4/5
      As its title suggests, this book works within the frame of a self help or "how to" book. Each chapter is headed with a rule (e.g., "Don't Fall in Love"), and the narrator uses imperatives, addressed to "you," as is typical of the genre. (Note: It would be impossible to write a book "in the second person." Person refers to the narrator, not the listener/addressee. Imperatives are simply commands--"Don't fall in love"--addressed to "you.") One of the effects of addressing the reader in this manner is to deliberately distance the speaker from the subject of his story, but this is clearly a very personal story of a man rising from abject poverty to wealth and of a woman (known only as "the pretty girl" well into her fifties) whose life intersects with his. So how does one become filthy rich in rising Asia? Through one form of corruption or another: hustling, stealing, prostituting, threatening, payback, demeaning, disloyalty, submission to those even more corrupt than oneself, etc. It's a life shadowed by sadness and anxiety, even when one's efforts succeed. Hamid gives us keen insights into life in "rising Asia" (no exact location or even a country is ever named), a view that contrasts with recent western paranoia about those nations supposedly poised to take over the world's economy. It's a story about the lengths to which desperation drives human beings in an increasingly materialistic world, and about the discovery, in the end, of what is most important to our lives.
    • 5/5
      A perfectly executed, beautifully written, compelling novel that is about universal themes of greed and ambition while also portraying "rising Asia" and telling a beautiful love story. In some ways it feels like the novel Balzac would have written if he visited Pakistan today.

      Unusually written in the second person, it almost makes "you" feel like the protagonist of the story, as if you are going through the experiences that are recounted literally from cradle to grave.

      Much of the rise and fall arc of the story follows a conventional, archetypal pattern of moving from country to city, moving from fraudulent business to a more respectable but still corrupt corporation, and all the usual stages including apprenticeships, violence, bribery, military contracts and the like. And much of the progression feels inevitable. But that is not the same as uninteresting or predictable--in fact almost the complete opposite, you feel immersed in it.

      The beautiful counterpoint to this story is the "pretty girl" he falls in love with as a child in school, sleeps with and then runs into periodically over the course of their life. Their geriatric re-connection, physically and emotionally, is particularly well told and moving.
    • 4/5
      An interesting and creative book. Written as a self-help manual, complete with chapter titles such as "get an education" and "focus on the fundamentals", this is the story of the rise and fall of a young Asian man...from poverty and near death, to the pinnacle of success as a businessman, to old age and death. The author uses sparse prose to build the two main characters, the young boy and the pretty girl. They are rich characters, with their motivations and emotions fully exposed, yet in the neutral tones of the self-help genre. So, with this book, you get a good story and a unique format which adds so the story telling -- I loved it.
    • 5/5
      Hamid's writing is brilliant! The unique approach of a novel constructed as a self-help book is really clever without feeling at all gimmicky. The dark humor is delivered perfectly in this audio edition of the book, read to us by the author. Hamid's use of language is nothing short of masterful! This novel mocks the dream of wealth and the path one might be forced to travel in order to achieve it. The overall effect is a smart, tongue-in-cheek denouncement of a life spent seeking riches, a somewhat frightening perception of corporate dark machinations, and a resounding socio-political statement!
    • 4/5
      I felt that the plot of this book, was pretty conventional and a bit trite. But the way that the author told the story was very intriguing and made me much more interested in the characters and in the book overall. It took me until about page 60 to realize that there were no names used at all which caught me by surprise but I still found it very easy to read and keep track of all the characters. Hamid is a skilled novelist to be able to pull of a literary achievement such as this book.
    • 5/5
      This book gave me a shock similar to when I first read Midnight's Children by Rushdie. Both authors have a lot in common: a similar insight in the human psyche, a strong sensuous streak, and a way of inserting magic in the narrative in such a way that to the reader it seems perfectly natural and believable. But in this case it is Pakistan (and not India) that populates the novel as one of its protagonists, and this author has a younger, sharper outlook on modern life. Without giving too much away, the novel uses the structure of a self-help book to talk about universal themes such as the meaning of life and true romantic love, through the thoughts and struggles of people in today's rapidly developing South Asian economies, with their corruption, pollution, noise and filth. The writing is beautiful, with that peculiar mesmerising rhythm of the Subcontinent yielding phrases to be savoured on every page.
    • 2/5
      As many reviews promise, this is a clever use of the second person. It's also a clever use of the self-help book, although it's not the only one. (My favorite is "The Pablo Helguera Manual of Contemporary Art Style.") But I did not find this "amazing," "unforgettable," or "moving," and especially not "Dickensian." (That last is a favorite adjective these days. It might have been first applied to Tom Wolfe, and most recently to Donna Tartt and Jhumpa Lahiri: it indicates a nostalgia for a certain kind of encyclopedic realism that includes satire, comedy, and tragedy. Aside from the value accorded to the "Dickensian," this novel does't fit the category: it's too spare, too much beholden to postwar experimental writing and minimalism.) "How to Get Filthy Rich in Rising Asia" is only supericially a postmodern experiment in genres; it is mostly comprised of vignettes of ordinary stories of poverty and ambition in vaguely "Asian" contexts.The self-help format goes hand in hand with the metafiction, as in sentences like this:"Because if you truly want to become filthy rich in rising Asia, as we appear to have established that you do, then sooner or later you must work for yourself."I find the continual reminders of the book's title and purpose, together with the ongoing joke about the reader ("you") who want to become filthy rich in rising Asia, together with the implied intimacy, to be uninteresting after the first half-dozen repetitions. If the reader ("you") could have been allowed to have doubts, or if the narrator ("we") could have developed, or if the usefulness of the notion that this is a self-help book could have been undermined (as it is, slightly, at the end of the book), then this could have been a much more interesting novel. As it is, the novel's set-up is schematic and unvaried: it works well in the publicity materials, but it is not engaging over the length of the book.The book is also unevenly engaged with the possibilities of writing. The "self-help" passages are resolutely plain-spoken, but there are also interruptions of closely written passages, like this one:"Your mind is on the day's work ahead, and as you chew and swallow you barely notice the tethered goat at your feet, with its jaunty, peroxide-bleached forelock, or the battle-scarred, tow-long beetle winding its way to a promising cat carcass."It's as if the author sometimes remembers he is a novelist, with an interest in language; or to put it the other way around, it's as if the author of the self-help manual sometimes forgets what he's supposed to be doing. The same happens with the intermittent psychological analyses, and the love story; they sometimes toe the line of the self-help manual, and other times threaten to become dominant; but the author (the actual one) doesn't seem aware of any except the largest-scale threats to his narrative conceit. He (Hamid) knows when the self-help novel is running off the tracks at the end, and he tries to make that into a metanarrative theme (that is, it's almost a theme that a self-help book might disintegrate into a romantic novel); but in many other briefer passages psychological portraiture, narrative drive, and suddenly evocative descriptions just seem to happen without the self-help author noticing. In other words, even though on the surface this is the most controlled and artificial of narratives, I doubt the author's control over the possibilities of more open fiction, and it's his lack of awareness of those interruptions that made me lose interest in the book.
    • 5/5
      This is a book about the difficulty of love in the modern zeitgeist. The self-help notion is both satirized and interrogated - even self-interrogated to the point where even the act of reading, as a helping to the self, is put into question. The use of the second person singular enables a Brechtian distancing that allows the reader to always consider if/whether they would place themselves into the position of the character they are reading. This puts a moral dimension on each line. On the other hand, the pull of the story counters this, so that, in a way, the reader is almost being read by the book - quite a novel experience indeed. The fairy-tale simplicity adds to the moral tone, and counters the continual graphic reality of the 'filthy' that underpins Hamid's descriptions and events. The point of view shifts in a thrilling way, especially during the chapter concerning 'war' where the pov shifts into the laptops owned by characters and the drones that observe them from above. This book, like 'Catcher In The Rye', is deceptively simple and deserves to become a modern classic.
    • 4/5
      Inventively and beautifully written in the second person, Hamid creates a life story of a poor Asian boy seeking wealth. This small book has many facets; mocking the dream of wealth, exposing the underhanded practices of emerging corporations, the impact of urban life, and the intersection of lives and crossed paths. SRH
    • 5/5
      What an absolutely marvelous book! It is funny, heart-breaking, but also deeply political. The ingenious structure adds a delightful element to the story. Highly recommended, especially if you are at all interested in semi-functioning states and love.