BOOK REVIEW: MOTH SMOKE BY MOHSIN HAMID

MOHSIN HAMID

INTRODUCTION OF AUTHOR

Mohsin Hamid is a Pakistan-born writer. He was born in Lahore, Pakistan, on July 23, 1971. He wrote many amazing books with the help of a fabulous theme. He spent his early life in Pakistan and recently moved to the United States and the United Kingdom. The themes of his novels are mostly globalization, identity, and migration. He is known as the best novelist, but he has also written essays and articles for many other publications. Hamid’s style of writing and the combination of lyrical prose with an acute understanding of political and social commentary. Delivering a unique mix of literary fiction that connects with the reader from around the world. His writing style is characterized by evocative storytelling, simplicity, and clarity.

MOTH SMOKE

INTRODUCTION OF BOOK

“Moth Smoke” is written by Mohsin Hamid. This novel was published in 2000. This novel vividly sheds light on the complexity and injustice in Pakistani society. The author greatly tackles the obvious difference between social classes as well as the corruption that infects many parts of life. Hamid digs into the needs for personality as the implication of one’s choices throughout the people he creates. “Moth Smoke” is a gripping novel by Mohsin Hamid. The novel is set in the bustling metropolis of Lahore and centers around the life of a young guy named Darashikoh Shezad, also known as Daru. The whole story explains a variety of topics, such as personal identity, drug addiction, and social class differences. Both style and provoking of thoughts in Hamid’s writing give a detailed prose and compelling of telling story and catching the reader attention. The novel argues that the reader should consider the moral dilemmas that exist in society as well as individual actions and their implications. It offers a critical assessment of human condition, providing knowledge into the difficulties that individuals encounter while navigating a society riddled with social, moral, and economic quandaries. A guy in the novel Daru is a well-educated man who is trapped in a chain of terrible situations that becomes a collapse. His life takes a bad turn once he loses his position at a famous bank because of his involvement in counterfeiting. He develops drug issues and initiates a prohibited connection with his closest friend’s Mumtaz wife. The work received wide acceptance for its interesting portrayal of Pakistani life today. It was established by Mohsin Hamid as a major personality in literature in Pakistan and all over the world. The novel’s treatment of a complicated subject as well as its capacity to elicit emotion from readers create a strong and forgetting piece of literature.

CRITICAL ANALYSIS:

Moth Smoke is a title that symbolizes a moth, a kind of fly who always revolves around the smoke of a flame or fire. It’s known flame is dangerous for him, but it then flies around the flame, and then he is trapped in fire and dies. In the novel, we see a character Daru and his servant Manucci see a flame and moth who revolve around it and his smoke, so basically, the smoke symbolizes Daru’s life. He is a banker, but he ruined his own life because of love with his friend’s wife. He lost his job, became indulge in drugs, and started doing different kinds of crimes. At the end, a guy who belonged to the upper class became jobless, which meant his life was totally ruined. The thing he likes and is attracted towards him has been starting to get this thing, and that thing hurts his love, which is the important theme in the novel because he likes his own friend’s wife. His friend wife also gave hints, but when she got to know Daru, he started to love her and like her, so she told him I can’t cheat on my husband and hurt my children, so she left him. So after this, Daru started to feel weak, self-distraction happened, and he ruined his life with his own hands like Moth does. Moth Smoke is a symbolic title that symbolizes distraction, danger, attraction, and also fascination, passions of love. Untearable things mean the feelings of those things that you can’t get, so they’re also dangerous. If Moth wants, he doesn’t go near the flame and saves himself. The gap between moth and flame shows that the gap is defenseless and helpless, the same thing we see in Daru. We can say the moth also symbolizes the novel protagonist, and we can also say the moth smoke symbolizes a person’s love and passions. A human always loves those things they can’t get, but they also revolve around them, and those things give them disappointment. This thing doesn’t hurt society; the thing that hurts and gets lost is just yourself.