I picked up Fundamentally after attending Wimbledon Book Fest to watch a talk on Women’s Fiction with Nussaibah Younis, Kit de Waal and Sanam Mahloudji.
The talk was incredible, but I could only afford to buy one book (hardbacks are spenny, I will be purchasing The Persians and The Best of Everything when I get paid in a few weeks) after. Nussaibah Younis was hilarious, and the premise of her book was unlike anything I’d ever read, so I knew as soon as I stood in the queue that Fundamentally was the book I was going to pick!
Blurb
“When Nadia Amin, a witty and bighearted PhD, publishes an article on deradicalization, everything changes. The United Nations comes calling with an opportunity to put her theory into practice and lead a rehabilitation program for women caught in the crosshairs of harmful ideology. And why not? Abandoned by her mother and devastated by unrequited love, she leaps at the chance.
In Iraq, Nadia quickly realizes she’s in over her head. The UN is a mess of competing interests, and her team consists of Goody Two-shoes Sherri who never passes up an opportunity to remind Nadia of her objections; and Pierre, a snippy Frenchman who has no qualms about perpetually scrolling through Grindr. But then Nadia meets Sara, a hilarious, foul-mouthed East Londoner who was pulled into radicalism at just fifteen. The two are kindred spirits, and Nadia vows to get Sara home.
As the rehabilitation program picks up traction, Sara reveals a secret that upends everything, forcing Nadia to make a drastic choice. In the fallout, Nadia’s brown-savior fantasies crumble, leaving her to wonder if she can save someone who doesn’t want to be saved.
A fierce, wildly funny, and razor-sharp exploration of radicalism, family, and the quest for belonging, Fundamentally boldly inspects one of the defining controversies of our age and introduces a fearless new voice in contemporary fiction.”
My spoiler-free review of Fundamentally by Nussaibah Younis:
From the opening pages, it’s clear that Fundamentally isn’t going to be a morality tale, wrapped up nicely and presented with a little bow.
Younis gives us a narrator who is deeply flawed (my favourite kind). Nadia Amin is messy, impulsive and, at times, short-sighted, yet she is totally compelling and real. You really can’t help but root for her, and feel incredibly frustrated as she desperately tries to navigate UN politics to fight for the women in the camp.
What really worked for me was the tonal elasticity. Younis balances comedy and darkness so smoothly that I was laughing out loud one minute and then burying my head in my hands the next. The satire is brutal (the dysfunction of the UN and international embassies, performative wokeness), but the comedic tone never undermines the gravity of its themes or message and it certainly never diminishes the stakes.
I’ve seen some reviewers state they couldn’t understand the book because the tone jarred with the darkness of this story. Can we not laugh while exploring darkness? Or laugh when learning something new? Perhaps it’s because I watched Younis’s talk at the book fest, in which she told the audience that’s exactly what she was going for, but I don’t really understand the logic behind docking stars from this book because of the comedic tone. I thought it was very well done.
What stuck with me most, though, was the portrayal and stories of the women in the camp. Many were radicalised as teenagers, and have since realised they were “sold a dream”, for lack of a better term, and are now just desperate to return home. Sara, a Londoner who fled to Iraq to become an ISIS bride at the age of 15, made me think about Shamima Begum.
I was young and ignorant when her case was everywhere in the news, and I’m pretty ashamed to admit that I just accepted the narrative of “she’s still dangerous, she can’t come back”. This book challenges that narrative. No, I don’t think ISIS brides who still actively support ISIS should be allowed back, but I do think it’s deeply unfair how simply we dismiss girls who were recruited (see: groomed) when they were essentially children. The situation is so much more complex than how it is portrayed in Western media, and Younis gives us a deeply uncomfortable and heartbreaking insight into that complexity.
At the heart of the novel is Nadia’s relationship with Sara. There is a constant push-pull in the relationship because Nadia desperately wants to help, as much for Sara’s sake as it is for her own, but Sara challenges every assumption Nadia has on faith and religion head-on.
The relationship is even more poignant when we know how the author could’ve potentially ended up in a situation like Sara’s when she was an impressionable teenager, which Younis shared with the audience at the talk. She spoke candidly about how being radicalised can come down to something as simple as luck and timing. Going into Fundamentally with that in my mind, it completely changed how I read it. I’m grateful to have had that experience because it made the book and the situations of the ISIS brides even more horrifying and heartbreaking.
The only weak point for me was the ending. It was a satisfying ending, but after such a tight and steady build-up of tension, I felt like it was wrapped up way too quickly. I would’ve liked more time with the other women in the camp, whose stories had been introduced and left behind. Perhaps this was the point, that these women are just abandoned and forgotten by organisations such as the UN, and so for that reason, I’m not letting the abruptness of the ending affect my rating, even if I didn’t like it.
Final thoughts on Fundamentally by Nussaibah Younis
Fundamentally is incredibly original, deeply uncomfortable, fast-paced, heartbreaking and hilarious.
If you like your novels politically engaged with no clear right or wrong and deeply flawed characters, you’ll love this book.
★★★★★
Rating: 4.5/5
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