nytimes book review exit west

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A Novel About Refugees That Feels Instantly Canonical

Refugee stories often focus on transit, for obvious reasons. Children travel thousands of miles unaccompanied,  hiding in train stations and surviving on wild fruit ; men are beaten, jailed, and swindled just for the chance to make it on a boat that, if it doesn’t capsize and kill them, will allow them to  try their luck in other dangerous seas . But in his new novel, “Exit West,” Mohsin Hamid, the author of “The Reluctant Fundamentalist” and “How to Get Filthy Rich in Rising Asia,” tells a story about migration in which the refugee’s journey is compressed into an instant. (An excerpt from the novel ran in this magazine.) In the world of “Exit West,” migration doesn’t involve rubber rafts or bloodied feet but, rather, “doors that could take you elsewhere, often to places far away.”

When the novel opens, rumors of those doors have started circulating in a nameless, besieged country , where Saeed and Nadia, the book’s protagonists, live. They reside, at first, in an ordinary world. “In a city swollen by refugees but still mostly at peace, or at least not yet openly at war, a young man met a young woman in a classroom and did not speak to her,” the book begins. The novel’s sentences tend toward the long and orotund: “It might seem odd that in cities teetering at the edge of the abyss young people still go to class—in this case an evening class on corporate identity and product branding—but that is the way of things, with cities as with life, for one moment we are puttering about our errands as usual and the next we are dying, and our eternally impending ending does not put a stop to our transient beginnings and middles until the instant when it does.” That last phrase is a statement of purpose for both migration and romance. This is a love story, too.

Saaed and Nadia fall for each other slowly, and then all of a sudden. War speeds up their courtship, the way it seems to hasten everything; on the eroding façade of Saeed’s building, the rocket fire “accelerated time itself, a day’s toll outpacing that of a decade.” When the pair first speak about foreign places, on a secretive date at a Chinese restaurant, they imagine taking vacations to Cuba, or Chile, to deserts with “stars like a splash of milk in the sky.” Nadia wears a full-length black robe, “so men don’t fuck with me,” she explains to Saeed, surprising him. She drops another black robe from her window to him, so that he can pass as her sister and enter her apartment. They smoke joints on their dates and text each other during work; one day, they do mushrooms that Nadia orders over the Internet. Meanwhile, “a group of militants was taking over the city’s stock exchange.” After Internet and cell-phone service abruptly vanish, there’s a run in the city on supplies and cash. Saeed comes to Nadia’s apartment with kerosene, matches, candles, and chlorine tablets. “I couldn’t find flowers,” he tells her.

Hamid draws enchantment from abstraction, in the style of a fairy tale, and his narrative vantage point shifts through time and space with a godlike equanimity. In one paragraph, he describes helicopters containing militant soldiers that “fanned out above the city in the reddening dusk . . . chopping, chopping through the heavens. Saeed watched them with his parents from their balcony. Nadia watched them from her rooftop, alone. Through an open door, a young soldier looked down upon their city. . . . The din around him was incredible, and his belly lurched as he swerved.” Hamid, through this roaming narration, gently diminishes Saeed and Nadia, freeing them from the burden of speaking for the millions who share their condition. They seem like the focal point of “Exit West,” rather than its center, even though they’re the only characters who are given names.

When the city reaches emergency conditions—raids, lockdowns, windows shattered by bullets—Saeed and Nadia seek out the mystical doors. An agent who speaks in whispers, like “a poet or a psychopath,” guides them. “They knew there was a possibility this was the final afternoon of their lives,” Hamid writes. They squeeze themselves through darkness and arrive in Greece, where they find a camp of refugees whose skin tones range from “dark chocolate to milky tea.” Safe at last, they witness fatigue and bitterness in each other for the first time. (I kept thinking about how, in a different sort of novel, these glimpses might provide the impetus for the entire book.) They learn that the doors have become a global system of exit and entry. The “doors out, which is to say the doors to richer destinations, were heavily guarded, but the doors in, the doors from poorer places, were mostly left unsecured.”

Throughout Saeed and Nadia’s story, Hamid intersperses vignettes of magic-realist migration, in which the circumstances and desires that govern the outcome of each crossing are as unpredictable as the trickster doors themselves. An old man from Brazil crosses to Amsterdam, meets another old man, and wordlessly falls in love. While contemplating suicide, a man in England comes across a portal to Namibia, where he remakes his life. A man sees two Filipino girls emerge in Tokyo, and follows them, “fingering the metal in his pocket as he went.” When refugees emerge from doors in San Diego, an elderly veteran asks the police if he can be of assistance; they ask him to leave, and the veteran realizes that he, like the migrants, doesn’t have anywhere to go.

There is, in “Exit West,” constant underlying movement, and a sense that intrinsic laws of moral physics are at work. In a recent interview, Hamid noted that the current political paralysis in America and Europe could be attributed, at least partially, to our denial of the reality of mass migration. “The more that people who are economically freezing and precarious become aware of places where people are economically warmer and more safe,  the more they want to move ,” he said, adding, “We need to figure out how to build a vision for this coming reality that isn’t a disaster, that is humane and even inspiring.” In “Exit West,” Hamid rewrites the world as a place thoroughly, gorgeously, and permanently overrun by refugees and migrants, its boundaries reconfigured so that “the only divisions that mattered now were between those who sought the right of passage and those who would deny them passage.” He doesn’t flinch from the mess and anger that come from redistribution and accommodation—but, still, he depicts the world as resolutely beautiful and, at its core, unchanged.

The novel feels immediately canonical, so firm and unerring is Hamid’s understanding of our time and its most pressing questions. Whom are we prepared to leave behind in our own pursuit of happiness? Whom are we able to care for, whom are we willing to care for, and why are our answers to those questions so rarely the same? At one point, Saeed points out to Nadia that millions of refugees previously came to their own native country, “when there were wars nearby.” Nadia replies, “That was different. Our country was poor. We didn’t feel we had as much to lose.” Comfort, she knows, can anesthetize one against concern for others. When a door leads Nadia to a beautiful house with a fine bathroom, the towels are “so plush and fine that when she emerged she felt like a princess using them, or at least like the daughter of a dictator who was willing to kill without mercy in order for his children to pamper themselves with cotton such as this.” Hamid exempts no one from the cruelty that shadows contemporary life. At the end of a long sentence, just before Saeed and Nadia leave their home country, he writes that “when we migrate, we murder from our lives those we leave behind.”

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Awards & Accolades

Our Verdict

Kirkus Reviews' Best Books Of 2017

Kirkus Prize finalist

New York Times Bestseller

National Book Critics Circle Finalist

by Mohsin Hamid ‧ RELEASE DATE: March 7, 2017

One of the most bittersweet love stories in modern memory and a book to savor even while despairing of its truths.

Hamid ( Discontent and Its Civilizations , 2014, etc.) crafts a richly imaginative tale of love and loss in the ashes of civil war.

The country—well, it doesn’t much matter, one of any number that are riven by sectarian violence, by militias and fundamentalists and repressive government troops. It’s a place where a ponytailed spice merchant might vanish only to be found headless, decapitated “nape-first with a serrated knife to enhance discomfort.” Against this background, Nadia and Saeed don’t stand much of a chance; she wears a burka but only “so men don’t fuck with me,” but otherwise the two young lovers don’t do a lot to try to blend in, spending their days ingesting “shrooms” and smoking a little ganga to get away from the explosions and screams, listening to records that the militants have forbidden, trying to be as unnoticeable as possible, Saeed crouching in terror at the “flying robots high above in the darkening sky.” Fortunately, there’s a way out: some portal, both literal and fantastic, that the militants haven’t yet discovered and that, for a price, leads outside the embattled city to the West. “When we migrate,” writes Hamid, “we murder from our lives those we leave behind.” True, and Saeed and Nadia murder a bit of themselves in fleeing, too, making new homes in London and then San Francisco while shed of their old, innocent selves and now locked in descending unhappiness, sharing a bed without touching, just two among countless nameless and faceless refugees in an uncaring new world. Saeed and Nadia understand what would happen if millions of people suddenly turned up in their country, fleeing a war far away. That doesn’t really make things better, though. Unable to protect each other, fearful but resolute, their lives turn in unexpected ways in this new world.

Pub Date: March 7, 2017

ISBN: 978-0-73521-217-6

Page Count: 240

Publisher: Riverhead

Review Posted Online: Dec. 5, 2016

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 2016

LITERARY FICTION

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THINGS FALL APART

by Chinua Achebe ‧ RELEASE DATE: Jan. 23, 1958

This book sings with the terrible silence of dead civilizations in which once there was valor.

Written with quiet dignity that builds to a climax of tragic force, this book about the dissolution of an African tribe, its traditions, and values, represents a welcome departure from the familiar "Me, white brother" genre.

Written by a Nigerian African trained in missionary schools, this novel tells quietly the story of a brave man, Okonkwo, whose life has absolute validity in terms of his culture, and who exercises his prerogative as a warrior, father, and husband with unflinching single mindedness. But into the complex Nigerian village filters the teachings of strangers, teachings so alien to the tribe, that resistance is impossible. One must distinguish a force to be able to oppose it, and to most, the talk of Christian salvation is no more than the babbling of incoherent children. Still, with his guns and persistence, the white man, amoeba-like, gradually absorbs the native culture and in despair, Okonkwo, unable to withstand the corrosion of what he, alone, understands to be the life force of his people, hangs himself. In the formlessness of the dying culture, it is the missionary who takes note of the event, reminding himself to give Okonkwo's gesture a line or two in his work, The Pacification of the Primitive Tribes of the Lower Niger .

Pub Date: Jan. 23, 1958

ISBN: 0385474547

Page Count: 207

Publisher: McDowell, Obolensky

Review Posted Online: April 23, 2013

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 1958

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by Chinua Achebe

THE SECRET HISTORY

by Donna Tartt ‧ RELEASE DATE: Sept. 16, 1992

The Brat Pack meets The Bacchae in this precious, way-too-long, and utterly unsuspenseful town-and-gown murder tale. A bunch of ever-so-mandarin college kids in a small Vermont school are the eager epigones of an aloof classics professor, and in their exclusivity and snobbishness and eagerness to please their teacher, they are moved to try to enact Dionysian frenzies in the woods. During the only one that actually comes off, a local farmer happens upon them—and they kill him. But the death isn't ruled a murder—and might never have been if one of the gang—a cadging sybarite named Bunny Corcoran—hadn't shown signs of cracking under the secret's weight. And so he too is dispatched. The narrator, a blank-slate Californian named Richard Pepen chronicles the coverup. But if you're thinking remorse-drama, conscience masque, or even semi-trashy who'll-break-first? page-turner, forget it: This is a straight gee-whiz, first-to-have-ever-noticed college novel—"Hampden College, as a body, was always strangely prone to hysteria. Whether from isolation, malice, or simple boredom, people there were far more credulous and excitable than educated people are generally thought to be, and this hermetic, overheated atmosphere made it a thriving black petri dish of melodrama and distortion." First-novelist Tartt goes muzzy when she has to describe human confrontations (the murder, or sex, or even the ping-ponging of fear), and is much more comfortable in transcribing aimless dorm-room paranoia or the TV shows that the malefactors anesthetize themselves with as fate ticks down. By telegraphing the murders, Tartt wants us to be continually horrified at these kids—while inviting us to semi-enjoy their manneristic fetishes and refined tastes. This ersatz-Fitzgerald mix of moralizing and mirror-looking (Jay McInerney shook and poured the shaker first) is very 80's—and in Tartt's strenuous version already seems dated, formulaic. Les Nerds du Mal—and about as deep (if not nearly as involving) as a TV movie.

Pub Date: Sept. 16, 1992

ISBN: 1400031702

Page Count: 592

Publisher: Knopf

Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010

Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 1992

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by Donna Tartt

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Exit West by Mohsin Hamid, book review: The reader is brought face to face with the realities of war

Mohsin hamid’s timely latest book ‘exit west’ is a love story set against a refugee crisis but, despite its subject matter, does not become too heavy a read , article bookmarked.

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With novels like The Reluctant Fundamentalist and How to Get Filthy Rich in Rising Asia, Mohsin Hamid has proved himself a writer able to speak directly of and to the moment. His latest work, Exit West , is no exception. In it he situates a love story amidst the refugee crisis, painting a nuanced portrait of contemporary migration, from the horrors of Western hysteria to what it really means to leave one life behind in the hope of building another.

It begins like any “boy meets girl” story – eyes are locked across a classroom, an invitation to get a drink after class is declined but not rebuffed, accepted a week later, and two young people begin to spend more and more time together. The relative gentleness of this courtship, however, is contrasted against a backdrop of increasing civil unrest. The unnamed Middle Eastern city in which Hamid’s two lovers, Saeed and Nadine, live is on the brink of disaster, “swollen with refugees but still mostly at peace, or at least not yet openly at war”, but, as Hamid expertly shows, the slide into conflict, violence and the frightening curtailment of civil liberties happens all too easily.

Honing in on the individual human costs of the escalating discord, the reader is brought face to face with the realities of war: “Neighbourhoods fell to the militants in startlingly quick succession, so that Saeed’s mother’s mental map of the place where she had spent her entire life now resembled an old quilt, with patches of government land and patches of militant land. The frayed seams between the patches were the most deadly spaces, and to be avoided at all costs. Her butcher and the man who dyed the fabrics from which she had once made her festive clothes disappeared into such gaps, their places of business shattered and covered in rubble and glass.”

Meanwhile, mysterious black doors begin to appear across the city, through which its inhabitants start to flee – one enters a closet or a doorway in familiar surroundings, and exists in calmer climes like the UK, US or Australia, The Lion, The Witch and the Wardrobe -style: “It was said in those days that the passage was both like dying and like being born.” Although it might seem at odds with the realism of the rest of the novel, this surrealism actually makes perfect sense, a stroke of genius in fact, a means by which Hamid can both illustrate and then advocate for an increasingly integrated world: “Without borders nations appeared to be becoming somewhat illusory, and people were questioning what role they had to play.”

The poetry of Hamid’s prose prevents Exit West becoming too heavy a read. He doesn’t shy away from wrestling with some of the most uncomfortable realities of the Brexit/Trump age – Saeed and Nadine find themselves in a UK that’s “like a person with multiple personalities, some insisting on union and some disintegration” – but this fable-like novel has the soul of an accomplished short story and wears its message surprisingly and intoxicatingly lightly.

‘Exit West’ by Mohsin Hamid is published by Hamish Hamilton, £14.99

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Exit West: A Novel

• By Mohsin Hamid
• Riverhead Books
• Reviewed by Alice Stephens
• March 10, 2017

A couple flees home in a futuristic world where refugees are the new normal.

There are over 7 billion people and counting on this planet, a healthy percentage of whom live in nations that are failed or are on the verge of failing. When one’s country begins to implode, what does one do? As crowded refugee camps in Jordan, Turkey, Lebanon, Pakistan, Kenya, and elsewhere attest, those who can, flee for their lives.

According to a 2015 UN Refugee Agency report , “65.3 million individuals were forcibly displaced worldwide as a result of persecution, conflict, generalized violence, or human rights violations.”

In his fourth novel, Exit West , Mohsin Hamid tells the story of two of those individuals, Saeed and Nadia, who live in an unnamed Muslim country. Though their city is besieged by refugees, it is “still mostly at peace, or at least not yet openly at war.”

Young professionals, Saeed and Nadia meet at a night class on corporate identity and product branding. As their courtship progresses, their city plunges into chaos. Bombs explode, gunfire rattles, refugees pour in, utilities disappear. Nevertheless, they continue to live “normal” lives, going to work, meeting for dates, sharing a joint while listening to records in Nadia’s apartment which Saeed sneaks into by donning a woman’s black robe.

Folded into each chapter detailing the protagonists’ daily life is a passage that takes place elsewhere: Sydney, Tokyo, San Diego, etc. In all these locations, there is a doorway, “dark, darker than night, a rectangle of complete darkness — the heart of darkness.” Through that door come people, interlopers, who slip away into the new world.

Meanwhile, Saeed and Nadia’s city “resembled an old quilt, with patches of government land and patches of militant land. The frayed seams between the patches were the most deadly spaces, and to be avoided at all costs.”

Saeed’s mother falls victim to “a stray heavy-caliber round passing through the windshield of her car and taking with it a quarter of Saeed’s mother’s head.” Foreign militants pour into the city, and soon there are “bodies hanging from streetlamps and billboards like a form of festive seasonal decoration.” As the barbarity builds, Saeed and Nadia realize they must seek out one of those dark portals.

Their escape is addressed in a single, short paragraph. One moment, they step through the door, and a mere eight lines later, they emerge. That dangerous, arduous journey during which so many meet their end (at least 10,000 are projected to have died in 2016) is not significant to this novel.

It is after Saeed and Nadia escape to the developed world that we understand that, rather than set in the present, Exit West is a near-future novel. (Maybe the dark doors are teleporter portals, like in “Star Trek”? But no, this is not science fiction.)

After a stop in Mykonos, our brave couple goes through another portal to land in London, where they squat in a luxury building full of people like them. In fact, London is so overrun by migrants that “legal residents were in a minority, and native-born ones vanishingly few.”

Those native born begin to feel unmoored, and some become migrants themselves, like the accountant who flees London and ends up in Namibia. The title is a double entendre: Refugees are exiting for the West — exit, stage left — and the West as an idea and an ideal is disappearing (exit the West).

Unable to fight the ceaseless tide of humanity, construction begins on the London Halo, a ring city built “to accommodate more people again than London itself.” Saeed and Nadia decide once again to “pass through a nearby door she had heard of, to the new city of Marin, on the Pacific Ocean, close to San Francisco.” There, they build the lives that normal people hope to build, exploring their identities, actualizing their potential, letting go of the past to embrace the future.

Readers of Hamid’s novels know to expect a certain distance between the reader and the narrator. How to Get Filthy Rich in Rising Asia is told in the second person, which is really a cloaked first-person narration. Even with a first-person confessional like The Reluctant Fundamentalist , the reader eventually surmises that there is no removing the narrator’s mask; his mask is his face. The Other must always protect himself by sheathing his vulnerable core in impenetrable shadow.

Hamid takes this remove one step further in Exit West , which reads almost like a sociological report, Saeed and Nadia lab specimens whose past and futures are entirely known. The omniscient narrator reveals outcomes that have not yet happened, like the manner in which someone will die or an estrangement that will never be healed. It is as if God itself were the narrator, and Saeed and Nadia prototype figures like Adam and Eve.

By removing the melodrama inherent in a refugee’s plight and replacing it with quotidian incidents picked out in vivid, evocative and highly astute prose, Hamid elevates this tale from a self-pitying weeper or a heart-wrenching invective into a sympathetic, beautifully wrought story of two people propelled by events outside of their control who seize their own destinies. While offering a dim view of the future, it also comforts with a portrait of humanity’s resilience.

[Editor’s note: Mohsin Hamid will read from and discuss Exit West at Politics and Prose in Washington, DC, tonight, Mar. 10th, at 7PM. Click here for info.]

Alice Stephens’ column, Alice in Wordland , appears monthly in the Washington Independent Review of Books.

Support the Independent by purchasing this title via our affliate links: Amazon.com Or through Bookshop.org

Book Review in Fiction More

Compartment No. 6

By rosa liksom; translated by lola rogers.

A mostly bitter, occasionally sweet ode to the dying Soviet Union.

By Eduardo Halfon; translated by Lisa Dillman and Daniel Hahn

This uneven novella boasts compelling scenes but scant emotional resonance.

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Exit West: A Novel by Mohsin Hamid

Introduction

NAMED ONE OF THE 10 BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR BY THE NEW YORK TIMES BOOK REVIEW, SAN FRANCISCO CHRONICLE, PEOPLE, AND ENTERTAINMENT WEEKLY NAMED A BEST BOOK OF THE YEAR BY TIME, GQ, O THE OPRAH MAGAZINE, AND LA TIMES FINALIST FOR THE 2017 MAN BOOKER PRIZE FINALIST FOR THE NATIONAL BOOK CRITICS CIRCLE AWARDS  “A breathtaking novel…[that] arrives at an urgent time.” – NPR.org “Moving, audacious, and indelibly human.” – Entertainment Weekly, “A” rating   A  New York Times bestseller , the astonishingly visionary love story that imagines the forces that drive ordinary people from their homes into the uncertain embrace of new lands.  In a country teetering on the brink of civil war, two young people meet—sensual, fiercely independent Nadia and gentle, restrained Saeed. They embark on a furtive love affair, and are soon cloistered in a premature intimacy by the unrest roiling their city. When it explodes, turning familiar streets into a patchwork of checkpoints and bomb blasts, they begin to hear whispers about doors—doors that can whisk people far away, if perilously and for a price. As the violence escalates, Nadia and Saeed decide that they no longer have a choice. Leaving their homeland and their old lives behind, they find a door and step through. . . . Exit West follows these remarkable characters as they emerge into an alien and uncertain future, struggling to hold on to each other, to their past, to the very sense of who they are. Profoundly intimate and powerfully inventive, it tells an unforgettable story of love, loyalty, and courage that is both completely of our time and for all time.

Editorial Review

An Amazon Best Book of March 2017: When Nadia and Saeed fall in love in a distant unnamed city, they are just like any other young couple. But soon bullets begin to fly, fighter jets streak the sky, and curfews fall. As the spell of violence spreads, they flee their country, leaving behind their loved ones. Early in Exit West , the author Mohsin Hamid explains that geography is destiny, and in the case of his two young lovers, geography dictates that they must leave. Hamid offers up a fantastical device to deliver his refugees to places: they pass through magic doors. Rather than unmooring the story from reality, this device, as well as a few other fantastical touches, makes the book more poignant and focused, pointing our attention to the emotions of exile rather than the mechanics. Surrounded by other refugees, Nadia and Saeed try to establish their places in the world, putting up different responses to their circumstances. The result is a novel that is personal, not pedantic, an intimate human story about an experience shared by countless people of the world, one that most Americans just witness on television. -- Chris Schluep , The Amazon Book Review

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Exit West by Mohsin Hamid

• Publication Date: February 27, 2018
• Genres: Fiction
• Paperback: 256 pages
• Publisher: Riverhead Books
• ISBN-10: 0735212201
• ISBN-13: 9780735212206
• About the Book
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‘exit west’ author mohsin hamid answers your questions.

PBS News Hour PBS News Hour

• Copy URL https://www.pbs.org/newshour/show/exit-west-author-mohsin-hamid-answers-your-questions

Mohsin Hamid says he has been migrating his whole life, his own experience playing a part of the inspiration for his newest novel. Hamid, author of our March pick for the NewsHour-New York Times book club Now Read This, joins Jeffrey Brown to answer questions from readers, plus, Jeff announces April’s book.

Read the Full Transcript

Notice: Transcripts are machine and human generated and lightly edited for accuracy. They may contain errors.

Judy Woodruff:

Now, a work of fiction explores migration, violence, love and fear.

Jeffrey Brown sits down with the author of our March pick for Now Read This, our monthly book club. It's a partnership with The New York Times.

Jeffrey Brown:

Two young people fall in love in an unnamed city in the Muslim world and, as violence takes hold, they're forced to flee, joining a mass migration that's become one of the hallmarks and most contention events of our time.

But this is a novel, "Exit West," that uses realism and some magic to capture life for millions today and a possible future.

As we do every month, we have asked you to send in questions. And author Mohsin Hamid is here to answer as many as we can fit in.

Mohsin, nice to see you again.

Mohsin Hamid:

Thanks for coming.

I will get right to it.

There were a lot of people who wondered — this is a little unusual to get right to this, but a lot of people about how this matched up with you, right?

So, Elaine from Fayetteville, Arkansas, "Is any part of this novel drawn from your own experience?"

Another question:

"Are your main characters based on real people you know?"

Well, I have been migrating my whole life, so, in a way, I suppose I was always going to write at some point a novel about migration.

I moved to California when I was 3, and then back to America when I was 18 from Pakistan, London, now back to Pakistan. So the experience of migration and the emotional pain and confusion that comes from it, I think, do in a way come from me.

But, at the same time, the horrors Saeed and Nadia experience are things that I'm not familiar with, but are a bit like nightmares for me. Living in Pakistan, it's someone that one is terrified could happen, as opposed to what has been happening.

You chose — a lot of people noticed that the — not giving — well, there are the names of the two characters, but not other characters, right? Some places are named, but not the city where they're from.

So, Christina Pike (ph) from Cherry Valley, California, "Was Mr. Hamid trying to give this story a timeless, universal quality by not giving a specific location to the city?"

A bit. It's a good question.

I think that, for me, the nameless city partly was because I didn't want to name it Lahore, where I live, because something terrible happens to that city. And it would have broken my heart to do it to my own city.

But, partly, I wanted the reader to be able imagine it as their city or the city of their father or mother or their best friend.

And Jill from Connecticut, Bob Olson (ph) in Minnesota, "What is the thought behind giving the only two protagonists names in the book?"

The novel covers a lot of ground. It moves from place to place. Different characters come into it.

And having only two named characters just, I think, keeps the reader in touch with the emotional heart of the story, that whoever else you meet, they matter, but it's really these two, this couple, that the book is all about.

They move, others move — and this was the magic I was referring to — for those who have not read the book, people move through open doors.

Explain that, because, obviously, that interested our readers.

So, in the novel, these black doors begin to appear, black rectangles where doors used to be.

So maybe you're in your apartment, and the door to your bathroom has been replaced this black rectangle. And if you push through it, you're not longer in D.C. or wherever you live. You're somewhere halfway around the world, like Tokyo or Bangkok.

And suddenly in the novel billions of people begin to move, and the whole world starts to change.

And so a lot of people asked about that device.

And I was interested. Conversely, some people, Connor (ph) from Saint Louis said, "How and why did you decide not to write anything about the couple's physical journey out of the company?"

Well, I because what has happened is, we have become so focused on the story of how somebody crosses the border, how did you cross the Mediterranean in a small boat, or how did you cross the U.S.-Mexico border, crawl underneath the barbed wire?

And we think that people who have done that are different from us. It makes us imagine that that's all their life consisted of, and that's very different from us.

But once you take away that part of their story, you're left with people who are just like us, actually, that any of us can have this experience. And so hopefully taking away that part of the story doesn't minimize the importance in the real world that that happens, but reminds us that that is not what makes these people who they are.

They are people just like us.

But if you put it into a kind of magic setting, that opens up a whole other issue, doesn't it? Because then we wonder what — who are they, what's going on, how does this even happen?

Well, I think that what is happening is, technology works a bit like magic.

So, right now, most of us have a little black rectangle in our pocket or our backpack or our purse. And when we look at it, our consciousness goes far, far away from our bodies, like magically appearing somewhere else, looking at your phone, and suddenly you're reading about the moon or Mars or Antarctica.

And I thought, what would happen if your body could move as easily as your mind can move? I think technology is obliterating geographic distance. And so the doors in a way give life to that.

There was a question I was quite interested in, because it kind of goes to your thinking about how you write.

It's, "I have seen 'Exit West' described as a fairy tale. I'm not sure that's entirely accurate, but the language in the book does have, to me," this reader, "striking style that reminds me of someone telling a story. I felt like a listener in some ways, rather than a reader."

I'm really happy to hear that. I write by reading myself, myself out loud again and again. I think that we…

You walk around the room talking to yourself, reading?

If you were to see me from a distance, you would think that I was crazy, just this guy pacing around in his study talking to himself. But, yes, I'm reading constantly. I read two hours out loud for every one hour I write.

But I think the reason why that matters is because we imagine we read with our eyes, but we actually process words and language through circuitry in our minds connected to our ears.

And there was a lot of people wondering — I'm not going to give away the ending for everybody, but a lot of people wondering about where this leaves you.

Are you optimistic about the situation, the refugee situation?

I'm optimistic about our species.

You know, we are descended from refugees, all of us. Our people have migrated. Everybody comes from the mother continent of Africa. And now people have moved on since then.

So I think that we will find a way. Human beings do. And the current fear that we have of the future, I suspect we will overcome it.

We're going to continue our talk. And we will have that entire conversation available online.

For now, first, let me say thank you, Mohsin Hamid, for joining us.

And let me tell you at home all about our pick for April, as we turn back to nonfiction.

The next book is "The Death and Life of The Great Lakes." It's an epic and wonderfully told story of history, science and reportage about the largest source of freshwater in the world and the threat to America's waterways.

Prize-winning author Dan Egan will join us for online extras all month and then answer your questions right here at the end of April.

So, remember, you can join Now Read This on Facebook and through the "NewsHour" site. We're at 51,000 readers and counting in the book club. And, most importantly, everybody's reading along.

Join us. Thanks.

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9780735212176

Mohsin Hamid

Penguin Publishing Group

07 March 2017

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A Book and Literary Travel Blog

Exit West by Mohsin Hamid | Book Review

“(…) but that is the way of things, for when we migrate, we murder from our lives those we leave behind”.

 “(..) to love is to enter into the inevitability of one day being able to protect what is most valuable to you”.

“We are all migrants through time”.  

“Exit West” by Mohsin Hamid is a tale about migration, through places, time, cultures. The story of the main protagonists, Nadia and Saeed,  explores many intersecting themes including the position of women living independently in a patriarchal society, a portrayal of destruction and mass violence caused by wars, the meaning of home, of belonging, of being a refugee, migrant through time and places, a portrayal of grief after losing the loved ones and over relationships ending, a relation with one’s family, culture, the significance of our personal dreams and of objects in one’s life and its association with the lives of others, the meaning of religious and cultural rituals, a portrayal of loving and nurturing relationship between parents and their child and the list goes on.

Overall, this relatively short book is about the journey one makes through life, often marked by the external events and circumstances over which one has no control.

“Exit West” is packed with many ideas and it presents the issues that many of us have faced in our daily lives, regardless if one is an immigrant, refugee or not. This tale provides one of the best depictions of complex relationship between two kindred souls trying to walk the path of life together, but life experiences change the trajectory of that path forcing these two gentle souls to choose separate ways.

Refugees, immigration, journey and the passage through ‘magical doors’

Nadia and Saeed live in an unnamed war-torn city somewhere in the Middle East. At the beginning of the book we read about the refugees in Nadia’s and Saeed’s home city just before the fighting begins. As the war rages, a young couple decides to seek refuge from atrocities and they make the passage through ‘magical doors’   where the passage is both “like dying and like being born, it feels like a beginning and an end”.

In the world created by Mohsin Hamid, those ‘magical doors’ are the way people around the world can go from one place to another. There is no need to cross the Mediterranean Sea or the land border between Mexico and the United States. Once you find ‘magical door’ you can move across the continents. The doors to rich countries are always heavily guarded while the doors to poorer countries usually are left unsecured allowing people just to go through. One often must pay a bribe to get an access to ‘magical door’ to the countries in the West. Similarly, like the refugees fleeing conflict zones in our world.

We travel with Saeed and Nadia first to Greece and then to London followed by the passage to the West Cost of the United States. We also learn stories of other refugees and migrants including Filipinas in Tokyo, refugees in Sydney, Nigerians, Somalis, Hondurans in London , parents trying to get their children from the orphanages in Tijuana, Mexico.

There is also a story of an accountant from Kentish Town in London who is on the verge of taking his own life . He also uses ‘magical doors’ and crosses to Namibia where he finds solace and peace within himself. To many London appears to be “a promised land”, but for some it is a destructive place that one must leave to save his or her lives. It links directly to the idea of perception – our life experiences shape our view of places and people .

“Exit West” implements the idea of ‘light’ and ‘dark’ London and how different this place can be experienced by different people, especially that perception varies as your “social status” goes down or up.

In ‘light’ London , people dine in elegant restaurants, ride in black shiny cabs, go to work in offices, are free to travel as they wish. On the other hand, in ‘dark’ London , rubbish is accumulated on the street, underground stations are sealed, people cannot move freely, refugees and immigrants are subjects to constant violent attacks from the “natives”.  

There is also a mention of many ‘Englishes’ that people speak, many different people within so called the same tribe express themselves differently. For some , it can be a source of belonging, of not being left out , but for some it might mean further alienation and not having life opportunities.

The idea of ‘magical doors’ which allow you to move from one place to another without a need to board the plane or cross the border illegally or risk crossing the sea   expands one’s understanding of equality between the ones in the West and the ones in the South / East .  If one disregards how one travels and which passport one holds, then “moving” or “migrating” appears to be very universal activity for all the people and not dictated by the place they were born or what passport they hold.

Being ashamed of your own language or accent is interestingly portrayed in the book when Saeed helps the immigrants with very pale skin (possibly the reference to many Eastern European immigrants coming to the UK like mysef) who feel ashamed to speak their own language even with one another. But that feeling of shame for displacement is a common feeling among many refugees and immigrants, regardless if one is from the Middle East, Africa or Eastern Europe.

The notion of being “native” to one’s country or place is dominant throughout the book. This is a relative matter. In “Exist West” we observe the attitude of many so called “native” Londoners who are trying to reclaim Britain for British people. This echoes the recent events in the UK following Brexit referendum and the whole narrative that has been present in the media shared by many so-called “natives” fuelled further by the right-wing politicians.

In the book, Nadia recognises that narrative as she heard it before when the militants took over her city. This refers to the unchangeability of human nature , good, evil and indifference exist among all the people regardless of their ethnicity, race, religious domination, or place where they come from. Nadia notes that “the buildings have changed, but the basic reality has not”.

“Exit West” provides two different attitudes that many immigrants experience. One as represented by Nadia indicates that a newcomer embraces the new reality – Nadia does not define herself through the place she was born in or through the culture she came from nor the language she spoke as a her mother tongue.  In a new place, she found the people like and unlike those she had known in her city. She avoids speaking her language and she avoids the people from her country. She recognises the universality of human experiences.

In contrast, Saeed is drawn to people form his own tribe, he is attracted to the feeling of familiarity : the same language, customs, the smell of cooking as it makes him feel a part of a larger group, he feels accepted. Although people (in London) with whom Saeed becomes close rather resemble the militants in his home city who killed his mother and because of whom he and Nadia had to seek refuge. Despite all this, it was the familiarity of culture and that feeling of “lost home” that initially drawn Saeed to them .  It seemed as if “the further they [Saeed and Nadia] moved from the city of their birth, through space and through time, the more he sought to strengthen his connection to it”.

“Exit West” explores the fear that many ‘natives’ have as newcomers who look and act differently to them arrive in large numbers in the places that they have inhabited their entire life. There is an interesting passage about migration through time without a need to move places:

 “(….) everyone migrates, even if we stay in the same houses our whole lives (..). We are all migrants though time.”

Religion, and perception of “the other”

Nadia does not pray, does not follow religious rules, however she wears black robe covering her entire body even when she left her war-torn country. For her, black robe is not associated with religion nor with certain social norms imposed by the patriarchal system. That is her way of expressing her own being. The meaning of the garment depends on the woman who wears it . For some, it will be directly associated with imposed social norm, for some it will be a way of expression associated with their culture, religion, belief system and for some it will be just a form of expression that is related to the woman as an individual.

On the other hand, Saeed prayed regularly and became more and more religious as he travels through places and time. However, he dislikes Nadia wearing black robe and he does not understand the need for her to wear it.

It is again about the perceptions and assumptions – one should not reduce another fellow human being to what one wears or how one prays and create the idea of the person based just on that. Many have multitudes in them which is often disregarded by the ones who fear complexity and find solace in simplifications.

The meaning of rituals in one’s life

A place of religion and various rituals in one’s life is explored throughout the entire book and it is a very nuanced portrayal. The prayer for Saeed brought the memories of his parents, especially his late mother and the smell of her perfume. It is also a ritual that “connected him to adulthood and to notion of being a particular sort of man, a gentleman, a gentle man, a man who stood for community and faith and kindness and decency, a man, in other words, like his father”.

“When he prayed he touched his parents, who could not otherwise be touched, and he touched a feeling that we are all children who lose our parents, all of us, every man and woman and boy and girl, and we too will be lost by those who come after us and love us, and this loss united humanity, unites every human being, the temporary nature of our being-ness, and our shared sorrow, the heartache we each carry and yet too often refuse to acknowledge in one another, and out of this Saeed felt it might be possible, in the face of death, to believe in humanity’s potential for building a better world, and so he prayed as a lament, as a consolation, and as a hope (…).”

Praying has a such a strong impact on Saeed – it brings comfort and solace in the most difficult times.  As mentioned previously, Nadia never prayed, prayer does not have the same meaning to her as it does for Saeed.

Dreams and Hope

When we meet young Saeed and Nadia just before the war starts, we see two young people – two gentle souls who have the same dreams and interests like many young people living in different places across different streams of time .  Saeed has this dream to go to the Atacama Desert in Chile and to lie on his back to see the stars in the Milky Way . He is full of wonder and curiosity for the outside world. Nadia had a desire to go to Cuba because “of music, beautiful old buildings and the sea” . She loves listening to soul and jazz music. As time passes and we follow them to Greece, UK, and United States, they lose interest in the dreams of their youth, possibly because of the overwhelming experiences and hardships they face as refugees. But at the end of the book we meet them again in the city of their birth half a century after they had left it and then separated. They promise each other to look at the stars in Chile together that very evening. We never get to know if they manage to fulfil that dream of theirs but I would like to believe that they did.

In the western world, we often hear that one should follow his or her dreams but many people in the world cannot do it, they often lose their dreams when they face the realities of lives.

Nadia’s and Saeed’s dreams also refer to that idea of simplifications and looking at another human being through prims of one thing. While Nadia wears a religious attire, she does not pray and is not religious, she loves music, Latin American art and enjoys smoking a joint. Saeed appears to become more religious; he prays regularly but at the same time the prayer is associated more with a memory of his beloved parents rather than with the religion itself. At the same time, he has had an interest in the world of stars.  

Relationships and Separation

“Exit West” is also about relationship between two people who “built a world of shared experiences in which no one else would share and had a shared intimate language that was unique to them”. Later on, what kept them together “was the desire that each see the other find firmer footing before they let go”.

It is also a tale about drifting apart and separation ; learning to live without the loved one.

After Saeed and Nadia went their separate ways, “they met again for a walk the weekend after that [separation], and again (…), after that, there was a sadness to these meetings, for they missed each other, and they were lonely (…). The ritual of their weekly walk was interrupted as such connections are, by the strengthening of other pulls on their time. (…) eventually a month went by without any contact, and then a year, and then a lifetime“.

Following their separation, Nadia begins to feel as if she belongs. She finds a new home – a room at the cooperative where she works. This room despite smelling “of potatoes, and thyme and mint” comes to feel to her like home, like her small flat she once rented after she had left her parents’ home.

I must admit that the portrayal of the relationship between these two gentle souls is so beautifully presented in the book and is one of my favourite aspects about this tale.

Connection with the world

There is also an exploration of internet and smartphones and their impact on our lives, often cancelling out distances between places but also between people. At the click of one button, one is being transported to far, distant place, can see “the other” who is similar or in many ways the same as “I”. In our world, phones are like this “magical door” in “Exit West” that are used to make a passage from one pace to another. They can lead to a better understanding, increased empathy and expansion of equality or they can strengthen the fear of “the other”, promote isolationism, xenophobia, and prejudice. Both versions have been experienced in our world in the recent years.

The representation of war

The representation of war in the book refers to unspeakable destruction that war brings upon places, people, and humanity.

There is a passage in the book when Saeed’s mum sees her former shy student firing his machine gun and Saeed’s dad sees young men playing football using severed human head. ‘Ordinary people’ are capable of doing evil and of looking in different direction when evil occurs in front of them. Public executions are common and people vanishing form the streets or their homes when no one ever knows if they are alive or dead.  There is a clear sectarian division between “us” and “them” . Certain letters in your surname appearing on your ID card can mean death penalty for you as it indicates that you belong to a particular sect that is now defined as “them”.  It is the narrative that is so familiar to Nadia when she hears it in London after she and Saeed had left their war-torn city.

During the war after she left her family to live independently, “Nadia passed her family’s home once on purpose, not to speak with them, just to see from the outside if they were there and well, but the home (…) looked deserted with no sign of inhabitants or life. When she visited again it was gone, unrecognizable, the building crushed by the force of a bomb (…). Nadia would never be able to determine what had become of them, but she always hoped they had found a way to depart unharmed (…).”

As described in the book, not knowing what happened to your loved ones is very common for people fleeing conflict zones. They often receive no emotional support, no understanding and instead they must deal with abuse, lack of empathy and ignorance from the privileged ones.

The position of women in a patriarchal society

Another theme that is wonderfully portrayed in “Exit West” relates to the position of women wanting to lead an independent life on their own terms in a patriarchal society where strict social norms are imposed on them.

“Her [Nadia’s] constant questioning and growing irreverence in matters of faith upset and frightened him [Nadia’s father]. There was no physical violence in Nadia’s home, and much giving to charity, but when after finishing university Nadia, announced, to her family’s utter horror, and to her own  surprise, (…) that she was moving out on her own, an unmarried woman, the break involved hard words on all sides (…), such that Nadia and her family both considered her thereafter to be without a family, something all of them, all four, for the rest of their lives, regretted, but which none of them would ever act to repair”.

Nadia’s relationship with her family contrasted with that of Saeed and his parents which was nurturing and loving.

Risks for women living alone, independently like Nadia were known to her and Saeed who was concerned for her safety, especially after the war broke out. Even then, Nadia was reluctant to accept Saeed’s offer to move in with him and his parents as she did not want to lose her independence. She became attached to her small flat, to her independent life, although she was often lonely and depended on herself. She got her independence back once she moved into that small room at the cooperative where she worked after she and Saeed made a passage to the US.

The fear of dependency on men or others was present in Nadia’s mind throughout her life , even when she considered leaving  a war torn city with Saeed: “ she was haunted by worries (…), revolving around dependence, worries in that going abroad and leaving their country she and Saeed might be at the mercy of strangers, subsistent on handouts, caged in pens like vermin.”

It is also interesting to see a portrayal of Saeed’s mother who through her marriage to Saeed’s father found her happiness and joy. It was a very nurturing relationship. We do not know much about Saeed’s mum’s background, but it is fair to say that the position of certain norms can be perceived differently by different women and hugely depend on the lived experiences that one has.

The meaning of grief  

Grief and the way one deals with it is featured prominently throughout the book. It is not only about the death of the loved one, it is also about the end of relationship, the end of shared experiences, the end of the world built by two souls, leaving one’s home which often signifies an end but also a beginning of something new.

Stories are depicted as having a power to ease the pain after the loss of the loved one. It is true in case of Saeed’s father.

Following his wife’s death, Saeed’s dad was crashed by her death. He spent most of his time with his cousins and siblings, sharing stories about the past over a cup of coffee or tea. As they were familiar with Saeed’s mum, she was a part of those stories which allowed Saeed’s father share “some small measures of her company”. Despite Saeed’s pleas, his dad decided to stay in a war-torn city, as he could not leave the place where he had spent a life with Saeed’s mum; “(…) he preferred to abide, in a sense, in the past, for the past offered more to him”.

There is Saeed’s mourning for his dad who died while Saeed is far way. Saeed did not know how to mourn, how to express his remorse, his sadness not being next to him when he died. This is one of the greatest hardships that many refugees and immigrants face in their lives – not being there for their loved ones, especially when beloved parents make a passage to the other side.

When Nadia and Saeed are drifting apart, for both it is a sort of bereavement process. Similarly, Nadia’s feelings for her family. She is not sure what happened to her family. Nadia mourns them without knowing the fate of her loved ones. As mentioned previously, this uncertainty is unfortunately one of the common experiences that most refugees and people fleeing conflict zones have encountered in their lives.

The meaning of objects in one’s life

There is also an interesting view of the objects presented in the book and how they connect different lives of the ones who are still here, of the ones who are gone and of the ones who will come afterwards.   There is a beautiful passage in the book when a photograph of Saeed’s mum, her earring, a shawl worn on a particular occasion brings some joy to Saeed’s dad following the death of his wife. Similarly, when Nadia moves into Saeed’s and his parents flat, the access to Saeed’s book and music collection gives Nadia insight into Saeed’s past and at the same time it allows her to reconnect with her own childhood. The objects had a power to connect people through the layers of space and more importantly through the streams of time . They are like ‘magical doors’ to our memories, to our past which connect us to the present moment.

Conclusions

“Exit West” is a beautiful book with diverse topicality. I do not think you read this type of book for “literary experience” only, you read it more for a better understanding of our common humanity in all its complexity and with all its nuances.

It forces the reader to reflect on the notion of the refugee, immigrant and “the other”. The tale of Nadia and Saeed asks us to pay attention to the universality of human experience and to the similarities between us rather than differences.

“Exit West” warms your heart and it shows you how easily you can become “Nadia” or “Saeed” in the contemporary “fluid” world. 

This book serves as a sort of a fighting tool against the stereotypes and generalisations that many make about people coming from the distant lands.

“Exit West” reminds us that people have multiple layers of being in them. They are not just one thing, they are many things at the same time, and they should not have to be forced to choose only one belonging, one idea of home, one type of being.

There is also compassion and understanding for people living in one place experiencing the arrivals of the newcomers who are very different to them. It is referred to as a migration through time and should be a source of further questioning. “We all are migrants through times”.

I wish there were more books written about immigrants and refugees with so much depth and nuance like “Exit West” by Mohsin Hamid . The intersection of all the themes is well executed and I am glad that they all have been included in this relatively short book as the human experience and human life is complex in itself and it is never just one thing, it is multitudes of thoughts, ideas, homes, cultures and belongings.

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CHRISTOPHER ISHERWOOD INSIDE OUT, by Katherine Bucknell

Many writers’ graves are tourist attractions . Not Christopher Isherwood’s. Indeed, he doesn’t have one. Best remembered for his “Berlin Stories,” which became “I Am a Camera” which became “Cabaret” — and latterly for “A Single Man,” which the designer Tom Ford made into a movie — Isherwood, who died in 1986 at 81 , signed away his corpse to science.

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The biographers’ little-lion friend, their main Christopher whisperer, is Don Bachardy: the artist and Isherwood’s longtime partner , 30 years his junior and fondly known as Kitty. A landed-gentry Englishman who’d uprooted improbably to Los Angeles, Isherwood was Dobbin, after a toy horse he’d been given by his nanny as a child. They called themselves the Animals , their private domestic idyll the “basket.”

Dozens of other lovers pawed curiously at this basket — some even jumped in, for a time — but none unraveled or overturned it. The couple, who met when Bachardy was 18 and took a while to be accepted even in Isherwood’s bohemian circle, were the first subject of David Hockney’s celebrated double-portrait series.

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Don't see who you're looking for? Please try the search box at the top of this page.                               Don't see who you're looking for? Please try the search box at the top of this page.                                 Don't see who you're looking for? Please try the search box at the top of this page.                                 Don't see who you're looking for? Please try the search box at the top of this page.                                     Don't see who you're looking for? Please try the search box at the top of this page.                                       Don't see who you're looking for? Please try the search box at the top of this page.                                       Don't see who you're looking for? Please try the search box at the top of this page.                                 Don't see who you're looking for? Please try the search box at the top of this page.                                 Don't see who you're looking for? 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Recent Reviews New Releases Five Star Reads Best of the Years Children’s (MG) SFF Young Adult (YA) FF Comics Reviews How to Read Comics Short Fiction Stand-Alone SFF British Science Fiction Award Locus Award Mythopoeic Award Nebula Award Shirley Jackson Award Theodore Sturgeon Award World Fantasy Award SFF on Film & TV The FanLit Reviewers Our rating system Contact / Donate / FAQ Apply to join our staff The FanLit Stacks Select Page Exit West: A slightly speculative exploration of love, migration and nationality Posted by Marion Deeds ´s rating: 4.5 | Mohsin Hamid | Edge , Stand-Alone | SFF Reviews | 1 comment | 2017’s Exit West by Mohsin Hamid is definitely not speculative fiction. It is general fiction, literary in nature, which uses a trope of speculative fiction as one way to explore the nature of war, love and human migration. There is always a risk when a general fiction writer “discovers” speculative fiction and tries to write it without having read within the genre. The story often contains hackneyed, tired-out elements which the writer trumpets as new and amazing. Hamid dodges this risk completely. His strange black rectangles, which appear in doorways, like in closets or storage sheds, and lead to other parts of the world, are not explained. Even though they lead to mass migrations, they are a minor part of the story. Exit West focuses on the impact of migration on nations, communities, and individuals, in particular two named individuals, Nadia and Saeed. Nadia and Saeed meet in an unnamed eastern city that is experiencing civil unrest (which is rapidly escalating into war). They are attracted to each other, even though they are very different. Saeed lives happily with his mother and father and is devout. Nadia has rebelled against her family, lives independently and is agnostic or perhaps even an atheist, even though she wears long black robes that cover her body. She wears these not because she is devout but because they protect her, an unaccompanied woman, as she moves about the city. Interspersed with the beginning of their slow courtship are vignettes from other parts of the world. In Tokyo a bemused Yakuza soldier watches as two Filipina women come out of a bar’s storage room. In one scene that is emblematic for me, a man creeps out of the closet of a sleeping woman’s bedroom. He touches nothing, he takes nothing, he merely climbs out her window and leaves. As Nadia and Saeed grow closer, so does the war between militants and the government, and life in the city becomes more difficult and more dangerous. Parts of the city are held by the government, parts by the militants, and the borders of those areas are the most dangerous places. Saeed’s mother is killed by a stray bullet; Nadia agrees to move in with him and his father for protection, as things get worse and worse. Finally, the two lovers reluctantly agree to leave through one of the portals. Mohsin Hamid Nobody in Exit West , except the two lovers, is named. Characters like Saeed’s parents are well-realized but they are called “Saeed’s father,” or “the woman at the grocery.” This goes a long way to creating the sense that these people could be any people. It could be anyone’s dentist who disappears, anyone’s mother who is killed while she searches for a stray earring in the family car. As Nadia and Saeed begin to move, going first to Mykonos, Greece, then to London, England, and ultimately to Marin County, California in the USA, the other migrants they meet are people, regular people. Before they leave their home city, we learn that the militants are using the portals to smuggle in fighters; when our main characters are in London, we learn that those same military extremists are sending fighters through the portals into cities like London to kill, in the hopes that they will turn the local residents against the refugees. While in London, the migrants face threats from nativists, riots and government intervention. In a sequence that mirrors the divided nature of the original city, the government turns off the electricity in the neighborhoods that are filled with migrants, creating a patchwork of light and dark, warmth and cold, poverty and comfort. Hamid plays fair; the portals seem to always appear within an existing door, so, for instance, the portal to London opens inside a forty-room mansion that is soon filled with strangers from all over the world. People are literally coming into homes. As their trek continues, we see the original characteristics of Saeed and Nadia playing out and beginning to splinter their relationship. Saeed longs for his home and seeks out people from his land and city, especially prayer groups, while Nadia approaches strangers, finding herself part of a more global community. Exit West has an artistic resolution, not a technological or plot-driven one. HIGHLIGHT HERE TO READ A SPOILER:  It seems, at the end, that some nations have found ways to accommodate the migrants and use of the portals has reached an equilibrium of some sort. The final chapters show us Saeed and Nadia several decades on, in a familiar place, meeting for coffee. In an interview on PBS News Hour , Hamid said that he considers that many of us carry around black rectangles that can take us anywhere in the world, and he means our smart phones. It’s no accident that Nadia and Saeed plan all their early assignations by cellphone and nearly lose each other early in the book when electricity and connectivity fail in their home city. This is why the image of the sleeping woman with the stranger walking through her bedroom was so moving to me; it’s the internet. We invite people and their stories into our rooms and our most intimate spaces. Many of them are just regular people. Some of them are dangerous. Some of them need our help. The difference between a five-star book and a four-and-a-half star book for me can often be tiny. Hamid uses a particular prose style that includes long sentences, often paragraph length. He does this very well, and for most of Exit West it created for me the narrative voice of a storyteller. It did, however, get monotonous in one or two places. And for a story that is blunt about physical shame when residents of the home city must empty their bowels in slit trenches dug in the back yard, it never once mentions what Nadia does for supplies when she is menstruating, even though we are in her point of view nearly half the time. These are tiny points in an excellent book, but I couldn’t help noticing them. While it isn’t purely speculative, Exit West will be on my bookshelf next to other works like Ada Palmer’s Too Like the Lightning and Malka Older’s INFORMATION series . Like those books, Exit West asks us, in this day and age, “What, now, is a border? What, now, is a nation?” Marion Deeds, with us since March, 2011, is the author of the fantasy novella ALUMINUM LEAVES. Her short fiction has appeared in the anthologies BEYOND THE STARS, THE WAND THAT ROCKS THE CRADLE, STRANGE CALIFORNIA, and in Podcastle, The Noyo River Review, Daily Science Fiction and Flash Fiction Online. She’s retired from 35 years in county government, and spends some of her free time volunteering at a second-hand bookstore in her home town. April 18th, 2018. Marion Deeds ´s rating: 4.5 | Mohsin Hamid | Edge , Stand-Alone | SFF Reviews | 1 comment | Marion, with all due respect, the intro to this review is some of the most blinkered commentary I’ve read in a while. Contrary to the push towards openness and inclusion happening in (some pockets of) culture, your commentary builds a wall: us and them. We who know what genre is and those who don’t, i.e. those outsiders who would seek (and almost always) fail to use OUR tropes for THEIR benefit. It’s petty. I would quickly run out of fingers counting the so-called genre writers who deploy its devices in cliched, non-innovative fashion – exactly the “sin” Hamid is accused of. And yet because such writers are “friendly” toward science fiction, or fantasy, or whatever, they are forgiven their ways… What is it about so-called literary writers using the “sacred devices” of science fiction or fantasy that causes the noses of many genre fans to turn up? Fiction is fiction. Its a big, open ocean for any writer to work with its devices as fits their literary vision regardless of the shelf it falls on in the bookstore. Who truly cares whether Hamid paid his “genre dues”? Should it affect how his work is critiqued? You have argued ‘yes’. I would argue not one whit. Forgive the sharpness of this comment, but perspectives such as those I see in the review are frustrating. Like a lot of conservative rhetoric, they do absolutely nothing except build higher, stronger walls in people’s minds where no walls exist in reality. Open up! It won’t hurt, I promise! :) Trackbacks/Pingbacks Exit West by Mohsin Hamid | Deeds & Words - […] is a link to my review of Mohsin Hamid’s Exit West, a general fiction novel that uses a speculative… Leave a reply Cancel reply Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked * Don't subscribe All new comments Replies to my comments Notify me of followup comments via e-mail. If you prefer, you can click here to subscribe without commenting . Subscribe to all posts: You can subscribe to our new posts via email, email digest, browser notifications, rss, etc. you can filter by tag, keyword, post author, etc. we won't share your email address with anyone and you can easily unsubscribe at any time., get notified about giveaways:, enter your email address to get notifications about giveaways only. we won't share your address with anyone and you can easily unsubscribe at any time., support fanlit. KINDLE DAILY SFF DEALS KINDLE $3.99 OR LESS MONTHLY DEALS Recent Discussion: Hi Grace, thank you for this review! The Private Eye looks intriguing and I may pick it up. Best wishes… […] (Fantasy Literature): I originally picked up this hard-to-find book after reading of it in Newman & Jones’ […] […] Fiction (Fantasy Literature): Symmes Chadwick Oliver, the chairman of the Dept. of Anthropology at the University of Texas at… Mary Anning is one of my favorite historical characters. A Facebook account I follow was just asking about "magic school" books, so I think I'll point them to this… Subscribe to all comments: August 2024 M T W T F S S   2 3 4 6 9 10 11 15 17 18 25 27 28 29 30 31   309 IMAGES Review: In ‘Exit West,’ Mohsin Hamid Mixes Global Trouble With a Bit of Review: In ‘Exit West,’ Mohsin Hamid Mixes Global Trouble With a Bit of Exit West by Mohsin Hamid, book review: The reader is brought face to Book Review Top 10 books of 2017, as chosen by the NYT Book Review Exit West Review COMMENTS Review: In 'Exit West,' Mohsin Hamid Mixes ... Review: In 'Exit West,' Mohsin Hamid Mixes Global Trouble With a Bit of Magic. 231 pages. Riverhead Books. $26. Mohsin Hamid's dynamic yet lapidary books have all explored the convulsive ... March's Book Club Pick: 'Exit West,' by Mohsin Hamid (This book was selected as one of The New York Times Book Review's 10 Best Books of 2017. For the rest of the list, click here .) EXIT WEST By Mohsin Hamid 231 pp. Riverhead Books. $26. NYT Book Review of 'Exit West': A refugee crisis in a world ... Learn more about the book club here. Below, read a review of the book from the New York Times Book Review. EXIT WEST By Mohsin Hamid 231 pp. Riverhead Books. $26. You own a house or rent an apartment. Discussion Questions for 'Exit West' 100 Best Books of the 21st Century: As voted on by 503 novelists, nonfiction writers, poets, critics and other book lovers — with a little help from the staff of The New York Times Book Review. A Novel About Refugees That Feels Instantly Canonical An old man from Brazil crosses to Amsterdam, meets another old man, and wordlessly falls in love. While contemplating suicide, a man in England comes across a portal to Namibia, where he remakes ... Book Review: 'Exit West,' By Mohsin Hamid : NPR He's that good. It's a breathtaking novel by one of the world's most fascinating young writers, and it arrives at an urgent time. Hamid encourages to us to put ourselves in the shoes of others ... EXIT WEST EXIT WEST. One of the most bittersweet love stories in modern memory and a book to savor even while despairing of its truths. Hamid ( Discontent and Its Civilizations, 2014, etc.) crafts a richly imaginative tale of love and loss in the ashes of civil war. The country—well, it doesn't much matter, one of any number that are riven by ... Exit West Exit West was a New York Times best seller, [23] and many outlets included the book in "best of" lists. Kirkus Reviews, [23] Shelf Awareness, [24] TIME, [25] and Tor.com named it one of the top ten novels of 2017, whereas Entertainment Weekly, [21] The Harvard Crimson, [20] Literary Hub, [26] and Paste [19] included it in their lists of the ... Exit West by Mohsin Hamid, book review: The reader is brought face to Mohsin Hamid's timely latest book 'Exit West' is a love story set against a refugee crisis but, despite its subject matter, does not become too heavy a read Lucy Scholes Wednesday 01 March ... REVIEW: 'Exit West': A Slender, Powerful Novel About the Refugee Exit West by Mohsin Hamid (Riverhead Books) By Margot Singer. In an unnamed city on the brink of civil war, a young man named Saeed meets a young woman named Nadia. Saeed works for an outdoor advertising firm, Nadia for an insurance agency. Like young people everywhere, they listen to music, smoke a joint, fool around, go out for Chinese food. Exit West: A Novel In his fourth novel, Exit West, Mohsin Hamid tells the story of two of those individuals, Saeed and Nadia, who live in an unnamed Muslim country. Though their city is besieged by refugees, it is "still mostly at peace, or at least not yet openly at war.". Young professionals, Saeed and Nadia meet at a night class on corporate identity and ... Exit West: A Novel by Mohsin Hamid Reading Guide-Book Club Discussion NAMED ONE OF THE 10 BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR BY THE NEW YORK TIMES BOOK REVIEW, SAN FRANCISCO CHRONICLE, PEOPLE, AND ENTERTAINMENT WEEKLY NAMED A BEST BOOK OF THE YEAR BY TIME, GQ, O THE OPRAH MAGAZINE, AND LA TIMES ... Exit West follows these remarkable characters as they emerge into an alien and uncertain future, struggling to hold on to each ... Exit West by Mohsin Hamid Exit West. by Mohsin Hamid. 1. "It might seem odd that in cities teetering at the edge of the abyss young people still go to class...but that is the way of things, with cities as with life," the narrator states at the beginning of EXIT WEST. In what ways do Saeed and Nadia preserve a semblance of a daily routine throughout the novel? The Immigrant Book Club A book review on Mohsin Hamid's novel, Exit West. A story of political fiction of two lovers, trapped in a city in conflict. They find a way out, heading West. Hamid's novel captures the human spirit. He writes a story of survival, loss, love and acceptance. The author's poetic prose keeps the reade Points of No Return In The New York Times Book Review, the Pulitzer Prize-winning novelist Viet Thanh Nguyen reviews Mohsin Hamid's new novel, "Exit West.". Nguyen writes: The backdrop for "Exit West" is ... 'Exit West' author Mohsin Hamid answers your questions It's a partnership with The New York Times. Jeffrey Brown: Two young people fall in love in an unnamed city in the Muslim world and, as violence takes hold, they're forced to flee, joining a mass ... Book Marks reviews of Exit West by Mohsin Hamid Exit West by Mohsin Hamid has an overall rating of Rave based on 31 book reviews. ... Rave Viet Thanh Nguyen, The New York Times Book Review. Hamid's enticing strategy is to foreground the humanity of these young people, whose urbanity, romantic inclinations, upwardly mobile aspirations and connectedness through social media and smartphones ... Exit West by Mohsin Hamid At once terrifying and … oddly hopeful." —Ayelet Waldman, The New York Times Book Review "Moving, audacious, and indelibly human." ... Exit West follows these remarkable characters as they emerge into an alien and uncertain future, struggling to hold on to each other, to their past, to the very sense of who they are. Profoundly ... Mohsin Hamid's eerily prescient 'Exit West' follows a refugee couple "Exit West" by Mohsin Hamid Riverhead Books, $26.00, 240 pages. Reading Mohsin Hamid's penetrating, prescient new novel feels like bearing witness to events that are unfolding before us in ... Exit West by Mohsin Hamid: 9780735212206 About Exit West. One of The New York Times's 100 Best Books of the 21st Century ... —Viet Thanh Nguyen, The New York Times Book Review (cover) "In spare, crystalline prose, Hamid conveys the experience of living in a city under siege with sharp, stabbing immediacy. He shows just how swiftly ordinary life — with all its banal rituals and ... Exit West by Mohsin Hamid "Exit West" by Mohsin Hamid is a tale about migration, through places, time, cultures. The story of the main protagonists, Nadia and Saeed, explores many intersecting themes including the position of women living independently in a patriarchal society, a portrayal of destruction and mass violence caused by wars, the meaning of home, of belonging, of being a refugee, migrant through time ... Exit West Summary A large portion of Mohsin Hamid's fourth novel, Exit West, is set in an unnamed city in an unnamed, war-torn country. Shortly before the real breakout of war, Saeed and Nadia, the novel's dual ... Book Review: 'Christopher Isherwood Inside Out ... 100 Best Books of the 21st Century: As voted on by 503 novelists, nonfiction writers, poets, critics and other book lovers — with a little help from the staff of The New York Times Book Review. Exit West: A slightly speculative exploration of love, migration and Exit West by Mohsin Hamid. 2017's Exit West by Mohsin Hamid is definitely not speculative fiction. It is general fiction, literary in nature, which uses a trope of speculative fiction as one way to explore the nature of war, love and human migration. ... NAMED ONE OF THE 10 BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR BY THE NEW YORK TIMES BOOK REVIEW, SAN ... assignment essay homework paper phd report resume review speech thesis