"They could hear breathing and coughing and a child crying and the struggling sound of quiet sex."
EXIT WEST
Mohsin Hamid
I had the pleasure of speaking with the author late last month, a conversation whose contents are likely to be published in April, so this take will be relatively brief.
Exit West, told in fable-like poetry-prose, tracks two characters, Saeed and Nadia, as they flee the civil war that has engulfed the unnamed city they once called home through one of a series of magical doors that open out onto Western countries. The fantastical touch renders the tale even more dream-like, and time bends in Hamid's hands such that we get the stories of other smaller characters affected by the new waves of mass migration, all rendered in a sort of vertiginous simultaneity.
Saeed and Nadia are not alone. Other migrants from their country flee or attempt to flee through these doors that open at random in some buildings and out onto others. Migrants, mostly from the Global South, seek escape from the political turmoil that swallows up their countries, but the novel eschews simplicity. There are white migrants too. And while some host countries attempt to expel the new arrivals, thinking themselves antibodies, the response isn't uniformly malicious.
There's room for kindness in this story.
A hopeful narrative, as heart-breaking as it is, and as necessary a story as ever. If only to show a reader what it looks like when someone chooses to be more than their worst parts.
Mohsin Hamid
I had the pleasure of speaking with the author late last month, a conversation whose contents are likely to be published in April, so this take will be relatively brief.
Exit West, told in fable-like poetry-prose, tracks two characters, Saeed and Nadia, as they flee the civil war that has engulfed the unnamed city they once called home through one of a series of magical doors that open out onto Western countries. The fantastical touch renders the tale even more dream-like, and time bends in Hamid's hands such that we get the stories of other smaller characters affected by the new waves of mass migration, all rendered in a sort of vertiginous simultaneity.
Saeed and Nadia are not alone. Other migrants from their country flee or attempt to flee through these doors that open at random in some buildings and out onto others. Migrants, mostly from the Global South, seek escape from the political turmoil that swallows up their countries, but the novel eschews simplicity. There are white migrants too. And while some host countries attempt to expel the new arrivals, thinking themselves antibodies, the response isn't uniformly malicious.
There's room for kindness in this story.
A hopeful narrative, as heart-breaking as it is, and as necessary a story as ever. If only to show a reader what it looks like when someone chooses to be more than their worst parts.