Poster images found at Stefan Landsberger's sight.
Today's book club discussion will be treating this book (see wikipedia for summary). It's won the 2008 Pulitzer prize for fiction and the National Book Critics Circle award. 
The physical descriptions of characters intrigues me - men seem to be described initially, but the initial lack of description of the female characters might mean something. Halfway through it I've finally gotten a description of Mari, but not really of her sister. Eri, the model, maybe needs no description because Japanese and Chinese models fit a type: tall and willowy of stature, with higher-bridged and more angular noses, and lacking the epicanthic fold. The mind wandered to how class and status define "beauty" and how the genders see differently. Ethnic groups see differently too. Japanese readers see something exotic in Denny's, the way someone from Kansas might find a Teppanyaki house.At first I found the first person thing annoying. 1st person narrators are notoriously unreliable, ambiguous and subjective, and he refers to that when he says his “history” is at least true in its essence. That said, this makes it unconventional and artistic. The choice provokes discussion and avoids trite resolution.
The novella is overtly symbolic, in the nature of a Hawthorne novel, and is best understood in terms of an allegory. Wikipedia notes that his name, Changez, is Urdu for Genghis. The Chilean bookseller’s reference to young men captured and trained to kill for their adopted groups is Christian, right? But Genghis Khan’s tribe exchanged princes with the Romans in the same way. Maybe even Genghis himself, (if I remember my history channel).
Erica symbolizes the American dream, much like the Statue of Liberty or any other physical monument. Like Gatsby, Changez reinvents himself for the object of his desire, this Erica/ AmErica.
The crux is the Ghost seduction scene – where, after a failed attempt at “possession” – to “have her” - he tells (Am)Erica, “Imagine I’m Chris.” Changez hijacks the ghost of Chris and uses it to ram the twin pillars of Erica’s long guarded treasure. This results in, as the French would say, “La petit mort” her first with another man (she’d only reached climax one other time since Chris’ death, where she pulled her own trigger while imagining Chris.) Like the towers on 9/11, her shudders signal collapse and impeding devastation.
Or does Changez offer himself up as a vehicle for the ghost – himself a spiritual victim of a long lost idea? We can’t trust his rationalizations. Was Changez the plane or the hijacker? Meat puppet or metaphysical date-rapist? I see him as the incubus who destroys his lover and loses his soul. His rationalizations for co opting the dead Chris smacks of the rationalizations of date rapists on a recent episode of “The Closer.”
The allegory isn't pure or consistent. Working for Underwood Sampson, he’s been blind and weak, but he regains his strength after his hair grows out.Christianity is a clear source of the allegory, but Changez shifting identifications with disparate images shows his actions are rationalizations for baser motives rather than the altruistic goals put forth in a monologue meant, after all, to detain and expose an enemy combatant, so anything said is unreliable. Does he blame some Delilah for cutting his hair? Would he say anything's fair in love or war? Could the pillars be also a Philistine prison?
And what about Chris – and obvious Christ figure who died for the sins of others (remember he died of lung cancer though he’d never smoked until he learned his death was inevitable and immediate)?
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