Characters move through time and space like abrupt jump-cuts or skipping compact discs. Saeed is “an independent-minded, grown man, unmarried, with a decent post and a good education”. But it nevertheless means that we exit Exit West admiring its depiction of nightmare more deeply than we feel persuaded by its description of a bright future – no matter how much we might sympathise with the principles defining that future. Saeed is “an independent-minded, grown man, unmarried, with a decent post and a good education”. Their city is besieged by militants who commit terrible atrocities, evoking scenes from Mosul or Aleppo. Exit West Mohsin Hamid - The Author We are all migrants through time Moshin Hamid - Exit West ***** Literature fulfills many roles in our lives. The poetry of Hamid’s prose prevents Exit West becoming too heavy a read. You drive a car or a motorbike, or perhaps you take the bus. Saeed quickly falls in love with her. Nadia is less straightforward-seeming: she doesn’t pray but wears a “conservative and virtually all‑concealing black robe”, works in an insurance company but rides a “scuffed-up hundred-ish cc trail bike”, has veered off from her parents and lives alone. Free UK p&p over £10, online orders only. Exit West confidently adopts yet another kind of voice – a tone of radical simplicity that in the opening 50-odd pages borders on brutality, and makes every conversation, every detail, every scene feel at once vital and under threat. https://www.pbs.org/newshour/arts/nyt-book-review-of-exit-west-a-refugee-crisis-in-a-world-of-open-doors When he approaches his conclusion by asserting that “We are all migrants through time”, and when he shows Saeed feeling that “it might be possible, in the face of death, to believe in humanity’s potential for building a better world”, his bare-statement style works against him.

231 pp. Until, that is, those histories erupt. By Mohsin Hamid 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 mark them as “normal” relative to the novel’s likely readers.

EXIT WEST 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.”. They maintain an element of magical strangeness opposed to the plainness of the prose in which they are presented, and lead us to think of the novel as a form of parable. The dramas and love stories of individuals like Saeed and Nadia cannot be separated from these histories, even if, in their own lives, those histories are not necessarily preoccupations. Start your Independent Premium subscription today. As Saeed and Nadia try to develop their own true selves, external pressures accentuate their different attitudes to sex, to worship, to how they view their homeland.

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. “Exit West” does not lead to utopia, but to a near future and the dim shapes of strangers that we can see through a distant doorway. The code and character of John McCain, as explained by longtime aide Mark Salter, By Andrew Welsh-Huggins, Associated Press. They are cosmopolitan city dwellers who meet in “an evening class on corporate identity and product branding,” and whose first date is at a Chinese restaurant. The backdrop for “Exit West” is both the plight of refugees from places like Syria and the specter of Islamic fundamentalism and terrorism. While the city is unnamed, these sites of refuge are named — Greece, London, the United States.

Independent Premium Comments can be posted by members of our membership scheme, Independent Premium. It is also a possible world. Why Fauci says pandemic ‘didn’t have to be this bad’, Watch You go out at night and flirt and date. Saeed and Nadia fear that they are about to be engulfed in a second wave of carnage, and the ferocity of the opening scenes in Exit West will make every reader share their anxiety. Saeed’s own mother dies while looking in her car for a lost earring, “a stray heavy-calibre round passing through the windscreen … and taking with it a quarter of her head”.

Discontents and its Civilisation by Mohsin Hamid, book review: Dear Friend, from My Life I Write to You in Your Life, book review, Idaho by Emily Ruskovich, book review: A debut novel that stands out, The Refugees by Viet Thanh Nguyen, review: Couldn't be more timely, You may not agree with our views, or other users’, but please respond to them respectfully, Swearing, personal abuse, racism, sexism, homophobia and other discriminatory or inciteful language is not acceptable, Do not impersonate other users or reveal private information about third parties, We reserve the right to delete inappropriate posts and ban offending users without notification. Oct 09

In ›Exit West‹ ist ein überaus berührender Roman, der sich mit den zentralen Themen unserer Zeit beschäftigt: Flucht und Migration. The frayed seams between the patches were the most deadly spaces, and to be avoided at all costs. “In this group [on the island],” Hamid says, “everyone was foreign, and so, in a sense, no one was” – preparing us for an ideal of integration that his characters find variously attractive and difficult to achieve. You can also choose to be emailed when someone replies to your comment. You own a house or rent an apartment. There are no descriptions of life-or-death journeys in … They do so through the sudden, unexplained doors that appear throughout the city and that are portals to other places. 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 All Rights Reserved. Are you sure you want to delete this comment? He is now less interested in showing violence than in describing a solution to the problems it embodies. A major part of Hamid’s achievement in Exit West is to show how profoundly social damage will injure private lives – not only in obvious ways (physical injury, homelessness), but by hampering the ability to construct any sort of life outside their sphere of influence. It is also interestingly at odds with the device he then uses to connect his story with its remaining sections. While these movements cause unrest on the part of the “natives” — what Hamid, in a postcolonial reverse, calls the inhabitants of the host countries — the vision that he ultimately offers is peaceful. Hamid describes these threats in terms that deliberately echo some of the intolerant voices raised by Brexiters: there is a “reclaim Britain for Britain” movement of “nativists”, for instance, which soon forces a political crisis. They do so often, unexpectedly and in violent circumstances. $26. • Andrew Motion’s latest collection is Peace Talks (Faber). The reader, of course, must think about what would happen if her own normal life was suddenly, unexpectedly upended by war. In How to Get Filthy Rich in Rising Asia, Hamid ingeniously adapts the form of a self-help book to create a tale-telling “you” who becomes intimately realised while remaining a nameless everyman. Mohsin Hamid beweist, dass Literatur poetisch und zugleich politisch sein kann.

Once Saeed and Nadia have passed through their door, they find themselves in a refugee camp on the Greek island of Mykonos, where in the process of feeling variously relieved, frightened, outraged and threatened, they plunge more and more deeply into the questions of identity and nationhood that dominate the remainder of the book. Phone orders min p&p of £1.99. She is the one who offers him marijuana and psychedelic mushrooms, and she is the one who initiates sex. Oct 09 Are you sure you want to mark this comment as inappropriate? 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. This gentle optimism, this refusal to descend into dystopia, is what is most surprising about Hamid’s imaginative, inventive novel. The military backs down. The fiercely independent Nadia is feverishly keen to find a way out of the besieged city, and she and her more introspective boyfriend, Saeed, soon find an … We read to learn about a certain topic, to develop a deeper sense of empathy, in search of enlightenment or just as a pure source of escapism. You take your humanity for granted. Now it seems a little thin, and therefore conveys a sense of wishful thinking. Mohsin Hamid’s novel “Exit West,” which follows two lovers on the move from a country on the brink of civil war, is our March pick for the new PBS NewsHour-New York Times book club, “Now Read This.” Become a member of the book club by joining our Facebook group, or by signing up to our newsletter. Politics also matters as it does in his other novels, which likewise dealt with pressing issues: the troubles of contemporary Pakistan (“Moth Smoke”); 9/11 and the tensions between being Pakistani and American (“The Reluctant Fundamentalist”); and naked capitalism and ambition in an unnamed country (“How to Get Filthy Rich in Rising Asia”). Perhaps this is always a risk when writers use the same style to dream of utopia after toiling through a dystopia. Due to the sheer scale of this comment community, we are not able to give each post the same level of attention, but we have preserved this area in the interests of open debate. Learn more about the book club here.