Exit West
Mohsin Hamid
Rave
Positive
Mixed
Pan
Exit West
Mohsin Hamid
Rave
Positive
Mixed
Pan
Rave
Positive
Mixed
Pan
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.
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. At the same time, he insists on their 'difference' from readers who may be Western. Their city is besieged by militants who commit terrible atrocities, evoking scenes from Mosul or Aleppo.
Writing 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 routines — can morph into the defensive crouch of life in a war zone.
...the book is part pared-down romance, part 21st-century fable for a world of porous borders and new forms of connectivity. Summarised like this, Exit West sounds as if it might lapse into shopworn tropes of world literature: a redemptive love story set against generalised violence and apocalypse, or an overbearing political allegory with some hokey magical realism thrown in. But this wry, intelligent novel eludes these and spins out its own narrative shapes. The opening scenes of a city sliding into civil war are brilliantly managed, precisely because the details are so restrained, and the encroachment of fear blended so unremarkably into the courtship of Nadia and Saeed.
The novel’s Marquezian title might have been 'Love in the Time of Migration,' though this magical love story is, like most love stories told in full, a loss-of-love story — love abraded by the pitiless stipulations of living.
Exit West might bring to mind Donald Trump's loud claim, during the campaign, that he wanted to ban Muslims from coming to America. But Hamid, once again, approaches this topic from the viewpoint of the Other: Reading him, you identify with the struggles and sorrows of the migrants; you understand, at least a little bit, the conditions that refugees are trying to escape. Most powerfully, we are encouraged to imagine the characters' painful choices—why they might subject their families to incredibly risky boat voyages, and why they might leave other family members behind to die.
Hamid is finely attuned to those shifts, as well as to the underpinnings of desire that remain intact even at times of upheaval, and in both sweeping and detailed strokes, his two characters become entangled against the backdrop of the city’s unraveling.
With Exit West, Hamid has entered the realm of speculative fiction. It would be a pleasure to report that he has mastered the genre with the same biting prowess that he brought to his satire, How to Get Filthy Rich in Rising Asia, and to his Man Booker Prize-nominated masterpiece, The Reluctant Fundamentalist. But that's not quite the case. Exit West works best in its first half, as it describes the deteriorating conditions that its characters endure.
In previous novels, Hamid has used a heavily inflected narrative voice to filter everything through a personality that is not his own, but which he nevertheless owns as the author...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.
In his effort to move from specific current events to shared human experiences, Mr. Hamid straddles the border between the real and the fantastic.
The prose moves with swift transitions, mirroring the stealth of the time-traveling refugees, and details are offset by a wonderful dark humor. Long sentences curl around entire histories, but quietly, as though witness is sufficient in a novel that covers the repetitive facts of human struggle, and the ineffable beauty of human resilience.
Hamid’s novel is both timely—a tale about refugees playing out against a global migrant crisis—and impossibly prescient. When it comes to the future, he posits, we will all be migrants, whether we hop from country to country or stay in one place until the day we die.
An allegory about the contradictions of a world that is both thoroughly globalized and startlingly unequal, Hamid’s book directs our attention to that question of luck: the degree to which the places where we are born shape our destinies. Exit West is unfortunately more successful in broaching these subjects than in fully grappling with them.
Nadia and Saeed take the chance, and begin a new kind of adventure—one that Hamid unfurls in deceptively simple prose, as spare and dreamlike as a fable. But Exit West’s mystical spin isn’t a gloss on geopolitical reality; nearly every page reflects the tangible impact of life during wartime—not just the blood and gun smoke of daily bombardments, but the quieter collateral damage that seeps in. The true magic of the book is how it manages to render it all in a narrative so moving, audacious, and indelibly human..
In gossamer-fine sentences, Exit West weaves a pulse-raising tale of menace and romance, a parable of our refugee crisis, and a poignant vignette of love won and lost. Hamid’s imagery is gorgeous, his sentences unfurling languidly.
...at once a love story, a fable, and a chilling reflection on what it means to be displaced, unable to return home and unwelcome anywhere else.
Hamid graphically explores a fundamental and important ontological question: Is it possible for us to conceive of ourselves at all, except in juxtaposition to an 'other'?.
In an astonishing synthesis of political commentary and vivid imagery, Mohsin Hamid’s Exit West is a commanding yet fanciful outlook of the current climate of global immigration and international xenophobia, as told through the poignant love story of those caught in between.
Reading Mohsin Hamid’s penetrating, prescient new novel feels like bearing witness to events that are unfolding before us in real time.
Hamid's prose powerfully evokes the violence and anxiety of lives lived 'under the drone-crossed sky.' But his whimsical framing of the situation offers a hopeful metaphor for the future as the 'natives' come to accept their new neighbors. 'Perhaps they had grasped that the doors could not be closed,' he writes, 'and new doors would continue to open, and they had understood that the denial of coexistence would have required one party to cease to exist, and the extinguishing party too would have been transformed in the process.'.
In contrast to Hamid’s earlier work, Exit West is a novel of restraint and only subtle humor and romance. Hamid refrains from naming the city where the lovers begin. But the book rapidly becomes an ambitious and far-roaming tale of migration and adventure. This gesture arguably places Exit West in the tradition of postmodern magical realism inhabited by the likes of Italo Calvino and Angela Carter, where little doses of fantasy (raining flowers, or telekinesis) break the ordinary world’s laws. But the magic is limited to this single phenomenon, which feels like something quite new.
It’s a brilliant, fantastical framework that, in Hamid’s hands, highlights the stark reality of the refugee experience and the universal struggle of dislocation.
...a short, urgent missive in which each detail gleams with authorial intent.
Reading Hamid is like receiving a coloring book containing breathtaking vibrant pictures with no lines to contain the images. Again he wrote a novel slim in size—yet deceptively expansive.
It would be tempting to catalog Exit West with Nineteen Eighty-Four, It Can't Happen Here, and other dystopian alternative histories that, after November, have become popular again — except that, at a time when violence, famine, and natural disasters have produced unprecedented dislocation, Hamid's book is not necessarily alternative history. Rather than the totalitarian tyranny envisaged by George Orwell and all too easily anticipated in 2017, Hamid emphasizes anarchy, a world in which authority has collapsed and exile is the universal condition.
With great empathy, Hamid skillfully chronicles the manic condition of involuntary migration — more plainly labeled, the refugee crisis — without the remove of history or a specific location.
Hamid’s use of magic realism is brilliant, making the point that even if the journey itself isn’t ridden with leaky boats, drowning children and long stays in legally-murky prisons, swapping out an intentionally built life for one where nothing is certain is one of the most demoralizing elements of migration.
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..
...a thoughtful, beautifully crafted work that emphasizes above all the ordinariness and humanity of people who become refugees.
Hamid masterfully juxtaposes the unexpected and the ordinary to both complicate the lovers’ tale and offer an important critique of current refugee crises.
Exit West makes visceral how quickly and easily life as we know it can come to a terrifying end.