Exit West: A BBC 2 Between the Covers Book Club Pick – Booker Prize Gems

by Mohsin Hamid

A BBC 2 Between the Covers Book Club Pick - Booker Gems

THE NEW YORK TIMES AND SUNDAY TIMES BESTSELLER
SHORTLISTED FOR THE MAN BOOKER PRIZE 2017
WINNER OF THE ASPEN WORDS LITERARY PRIZE

'Astonishing' Zadie Smith
'Stunning' Spectator
'Extraordinary' TLS

An extraordinary story of love and hope from the bestselling author of The Reluctant Fundamentalist

All over the world, doors are appearing.
They lead to other cities, other countries, other lives.

And in a city gripped by war, Nadia and Saeed are newly in love.
Hardly more than strangers, desperate to survive, they open a door and step through.

But the doors only go one way.
Once you leave, there is no going back.

*Coming soon as a major Netflix film - produced by Michelle and Barack Obama and starring Riz Ahmed*

'One of the year's most significant literary works' The New York Times
'A masterpiece' Michael Chabon
'Addictively readable and brilliantly written. Fantastic' Mail on Sunday

• ISBN10: 0241979072
• ISBN13: 9780241979075
• Publish Date: 2 March 2017
• Publish Status: Active
• Publish Country: GB
• Imprint: Penguin Books Ltd
• Format: eBook (EPUB)
• Pages: 240
• Language: English

Reviews

[nannah]

Hmm. I’m not quite sure what to make of this book. I might just not be the type of person who can appreciate it fully, but I was left rather baffled by the whole thing.

Content warnings:
- sexual harassment

Representation:
- the main characters are all from an unnamed West or South Asian country (someone said it felt a lot like Pakistan)
- one of the main characters (Nadia) is bi

Exit West is a story about immigration and about the life of one couple during the hardship and terror of war. About what all that does to a relationship and what that does to people and societies as a whole.

It’s beautiful and thought provoking. But I struggled to connect with the characters and their personal story because of the writing style. I’m not trying to be pretentious, and I know the style and its (mis)use of grammar is fully intentional, but reading wordy run-on sentences over and over and over gets exhausting really fast. There’s even one page that consists of a single run-on sentence containing 60 commas (as one reviewer counted).

The writing is also very detached, telling everything and showing almost nothing. We’re told what the characters feel, but there’s no feeling it, no experiencing anything in real time. It’s like reading events from an encyclopedia or wikipedia entry. The story is a good one, but I could never feel it or get absorbed by it.

What I did love were the magical realism elements. It really added a beautiful and almost uplifting element to an otherwise somber story. And the writing style isn’t bad; the author is clearly very talented. It’s just not my thing. This book is still definitely worth reading … but maybe just once.

[brokentune]

“We are all migrants through time.”

Having just finished The Reluctant Fundamentalist before reading Exit West (both are due back at the library), I had high expectations for this book.

Sadly, I didn't get as much out of this one as I hoped I would. I mean the premise is fascinating, a young couple from an unnamed country that is collapsing in a state of civil war is trying to escape and make for a new life in the West. It's the story of so many over the recent years. It's a story that has so much to offer in the way exploring that human condition when faced with survival, faith, interaction with others, etc.

And yet, I think the book lost it's way a few times during the short story, as if it wasn't sure what it wanted to purvey, what its point was. Many of the issues that Hamid mentioned would have been worthy of exploring further, but he didn't. Maybe it is the brevity of the book that I need to blame, but Hamid's The Reluctant Fundamentalist was equally short and was still more successful in raising and discussing several issues in more depth than Exit West.

Or maybe it was the style of this book, the detachment of the narration, that didn't work for me. I'm sure the detachment could have worked to create that obvious divide between the characters and the reader, as if to say "you can witness, but you will never fully understand", but then I guess the book would have failed me because I needed the book to draw me in as the reader and become part of the story to understand the mindset and emotional state of the characters.

Whatever it was, it just didn't work that well for me.
No matter. It was still a worthwhile read.

[gmcgregor]

As long as there are parts of the world that experience war, famine, and oppression, there will be immigrants and refugees. Mohsin Hamid's short, delicate Exit West tells a story about two of them, Saeed and Nadia, with a small magical realism twist: people move between countries through doors that appear, seemingly at random. People go through them, but they don't come back, so you don't know exactly where you're going until you get there. You just know that it's not where you are, and for many people, that's enough. Including our central couple, young people in a never-named, seemingly majority-Muslim city. Nadia covers herself from collarbone to toe in a long robe although such attire is not mandatory...but she's an atheist who smokes pot and is sexually active. Saeed is more traditional, but still far from devout. They meet in a class and sparks start to fly...but then so do bullets as insurgents begin to battle the government in their city, too.

Soon, they're left with little choice but to flee if they want any hope for the future. As they enter first Mykonos, and then London, thousands of others are doing the same. Hamid tosses little side vignettes of other refugees into his story, showing how people react to the new reality: some respond with fear and violence, but others build unexpected connections. As more and more people come streaming across borders, tension between the native populations of the countries experiencing an inflow and the desperate masses who've arrived begin to build. But cracks begin to form between Saeed and Nadia, as they find themselves taking different approaches to life in their new reality.

There's something fairy-tale-esque about this story, and it's not just because of Hamid's absolutely jaw-droppingly gorgeous writing. Maybe it's in how Saeed and Nadia are given personalities, but still feel symbolic. Maybe it's the way Hamid "zooms out", as it were, every so often to give us a fuller view outside of their story. Maybe it's the familiar beats of love, and loss, and a journey. Maybe it's the undeniable sense of optimism. Maybe it's the elegance of the narrative. It's probably a little bit of all of the above.

I'll admit that I was wary when I heard that this book has a magical realism element, as that doesn't usually appeal to me. But I found myself grabbed by Saeed and Nadia, and their growing bond, and their reluctant flight from home, and their struggles to make new lives for themselves. And the device of the doors makes for a certain efficiency that works with the overall flow of the novel...like I said above, there's a real elegance to it, every word and plot detail seems like the product of a deliberate choice to include it. So using doors allows us to skip all the tedium of the mechanical aspects of getting from point A to point B. I was both charmed and deeply moved by this book and now I need to read everything else Hamid's ever written because this was amazing. I'd recommend this book to everyone.

[jamiereadthis]

One minute it’s hyper-surreal and dreamlike, the next it’s grounded with a detail so familiar it’s eerie. Rooms aren’t lit by stars or windows, they’re lit by touchscreens and billboards. The details that are so familiar they don’t often find their way into books.

It’s more like a fable than a novel, with a floating detachment and more telling than showing. But I think that worked. And the touch of magical realism was unexpected, but fitting (once I caught on). I’ll be interested to know if this sticks with me a year from now. That’s the drawback— since the characters developed through short vignettes, I’m not sure it will.

[Michael @ Knowledge Lost]

Every so often a book comes along that gets you thinking about an important social issue in a whole new light. These are the books I actively seek out, I am always looking for literature that is going to challenge my thinking or even teach me something new. Mohsin Hamid’s latest novel Exit West was a recent example of a book doing this with the topic of refugees. This is such an important issue and Hamid got me thinking about it in a different way with the simple introduction of magical doors.

The premise of Exit West is straightforward following the budding relationship between Saeed and Nadia in an unnamed country. As the novel tracks their developing relationship, it soon becomes apparent that they will need to escape. As the city they grew up in becomes increasingly unsafe, they are soon planning to leave everything behind. Through a door and into another country.

While the concept of these doors might be inspired by Nanina, Mohsin Hamid has stated he used this idea as a way to not get bogged down with the refugee journey. He wanted to explore the story as the events that lead these characters to flee and how it felt to be a refugee in Western culture. While I understand his reasoning, the idea seemed to work differently for me as the reader. The magical journey to another country gave off this idea that Western media do not care about the journey they only care about asylum seekers in their country. It worked to symbolise that missing piece that is often left out of the news when reporting on the refugee crisis.

In an interview with the author, he said the doors also where a symbol of globalisation. In today’s world we are able to talk to someone on the other side of the world face to face with video calling programs like Skype. The world seems smaller thanks to the advances of technology and while the idea of walking through a door into another country sound wonderful, it works as a motif for the complex issue of border control. Some doors are heavily guarded and other doors, like the one to their home country, are left accessible as if to invite them to ‘go back to where they came from’.

What I think Mohsin Hamid did really well in this novel was use the character focus to challenge the perceptions people might have of the refugee stereotype. Nadia wore an all concealing black robe in public not for religious reasons but to make her feel safe. Nadia is not religious and lives alone, she had to lie and said she was a widow to get her apartment. Nadia’s story is one of protecting herself from judgement while trying to explore her own sexuality. She longs for the freedom and individuality of the Western world. While Saeed is not overly religious he is the one that wants to wait to they are married. When fleeing the country he wishes to be part of the community of fellow countrymen, he does not want to give up on his traditions.

The two different points of view allows the reader to explore the idea of refugees from their perspective. Rather than focusing on the journey and the conflict with the Western world. Exit West focuses on their personal identity, as the characters try to understand their place in the world. For Nadia this is a chance for a new beginning, to reinvent herself but for Saeed this is the story of missing what he left, the nostalgic idea he had of his homeland.

Mohsin Hamid intentionally left the country and city unnamed because this could be the story of anyone. He did model it after a city in Pakistan but worried that mentioning any names might have been viewed as a political statement rather than the story he wanted to tell. I am so glad that I picked up Exit West and I know I will be dipping into more of Hamid’s works. This novel was so accessible, I feel like everyone should pick it up, in the hopes that it will get more people thinking about refugees.

This review originally appeared on my blog; http://www.knowledgelost.org/book-reviews/genre/magical-realism/exit-west-mohsin-hamid/