Exit West (2017)

Hamid’s aphoristic and controlled language made this a delight to read. The understatedness of the prose was “show, not tell”, allowing readers to confront the raw emotions of war’s violence, the refugee’s plight, and a relationship’s heartrending but unsurprising decay without embellished language as a distraction or crutch. The characters’ unflappable dignity and eventual safe passage give the novel a sense of hope even as it centers on the fallout of forced migration across the world. ( )

Sometimes a novel has so many layers and nuances that I feel at a loss at what to write, and this is the case with this one. On the one hand, it is a novel about migration: The reasons for it, the consequences, the sacrifices people who migrate have to make in order to save other aspects of their lives or their lives at all. On the other hand, it is a novel simply about two characters, their love for each other and how they and this love change over time.
The first part of the novel follows Saeed and Nadia as they live and fall in love in an unnamed city, which could be any city in the Middle East or South Asia. Their city is threatened by militants and war breaks out. What was most impressive to me were the descriptions of daily life in this occupied and later war-torn city.
Nadia and Saeed decide to leave their city through one of the doors that pop up and lead to other parts of the world. Although this is a magical realism element, it almost doesn't feel like one because it is not dwelt on a lot.
The two lovers try to start a new life in foreign places, they move on again, and their relationship changes over time as they adapt to these places and the situations they encounter.
So yes, this novel is not only about migration as such, but about how people change, about what they expect from life, about what binds them together and what separates them, and, as the text states, there is not only migration from place to place but across time as well.
This novel made me reflect on so many things, and above all, it also made me even more aware of what many people have to go through. I thought about the people in my life who have had such experiences. And it even made me reflect on myself and the kinds of migrations I have experienced, although thankfully they were never as extreme as those of many other people.
My only criticism is that I wish that some events would have been narrated a little more detailed. The summarizing style was a bit hard to follow and so I was only able to read a few chapters a time, although the novel is not long. On the other hand, I appreciated the style a lot because it felt authentic and in tune with the message of the text as I understood it. ( )

Mohsin Hamid's Exit West is a novel about the global refugee crisis with a twist. Rather than undergoing long journeys over land or sea the refugees in this book step through black doors and find themselves in some other part of the world. This allows the author to move his central characters into multiple settings, but it also leaves the novel devoid of an important (at least in my mind) part of the process of being a refugee—the exhaustion and risk of journeying. The characters are interesting, but not fully fleshed out, which left me feeling at a remove from them throughout the book. In some ways, the most interesting parts of the books are the brief sections where we get a page or two of a a refugee's story, then never meet that character again. Here the lack of complete information is an invitation to do our best to flesh out and understand their stories. ( )

Incredible magical-realist romance on migration, movement, borders, and time -- I read Exit West in one sitting and cried a tonne when it was over.

I can’t remember why I picked up this novel, but presumably it was because I figured that it would be similar to the Cellist of Sarajevo or Captain Corelli’s Mandolin - a story centred around the events of war, but containing a central human element that focused on civilians and the realities of war. Unfortunately, this novel came off much more as a romance, since it did not attempt to tell the story of the war through the lens of the people living through it, but instead told the story of two people falling in (and out) of love with social change as a by-product that presented a certain amount of conflict. Obviously the war the author is referencing is current, but somehow even that potential poignancy is missing from his narrative as he essentially tells their story from beginning to end without much uniqueness. I guess the whole point of this book’s popularity is that it’s easy to read, and makes an attempt to come to terms with present day events, but in comparison to other novels of its type it falls short. ( )