L’intégriste malgré lui

Lahore, Pakistan, today. A man sits at a café terrace when young Tchenguiz approaches, mistaking him for an American, and begins a long tale. He tells how he fulfilled his childhood dream of studying in the United States: a brilliant Princeton graduate hired by a prestigious firm, he even found love with Erica, blonde and blue-eyed. An all-American success story and a model of integration, until one day, September 11, 2001, everything changed. In this monologue of feigned candor, Mohsin Hamid poses fundamental questions about our world, the relations between peoples, and the troubled meaning of our identities and ambitions.