Hamid counters finance’s valuation of books through a Neruda-linked publisher figure

Evidence

Yet this view is immediately contradicted when the venerable but razor-sharp publisher Juan Bautista responds to Jim’s proclamation that he knows about books, having specialized in the media industry, with the retort, “That is finance,… I asked what you knew of books” (141–42). It is initially a shared literary inheritance that brings together Changez, whose uncle was a poet, and Juan Bautista, publisher and custodian of the spirit of Third World anticolonialism inherited from his beloved Pablo Neruda. — Peter Morey, Islamophobia and the Novel, 461

Categorization

• XREF: Juan Bautista as custodian of Third-World anticolonial literary spirit is a nuanced figure the reader could weigh against both novels’ treatment of art as resistance to empire.