peteg's blog - noise - books - 2022 09 25 MohsinHamid TheLastWhiteMan

Mohsin Hamid: The Last White Man. (2022)

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Kindle. The premise is right there in the title, so I can't say I didn't know what I was getting. The plot, as it were, is that the great arc of life continues whatever metamorphoses occur, however tedious and shallow those might be. Mercifully short but it could've been shorter with less annoying waffle and repetition, if he walked back fewer assertions and just said what he meant in the first place. For mine it's the worst yet from Hamid, the second consecutive thumbs down from me. I do not know who he wrote this for.

Goodreads. Apparently it provoked thought in some readers, though these thoughts are generally unshared or unshareable. David Gates at the New York Times: flat-footed fabulism. And so on. The vibe is general bemusement. Much later, Karan Mahajan.