Exit West by Mohsin Hamid (Hamish Hamilton, £14.99)
The casualties of our divided world are the subject of Man Booker-nominated Pakistani author Mohsin Hamid’s latest novel, Exit West. The book follows the paths of Saeed and Nadia, who fall in love against the backdrop of a nameless city which is “not yet openly at war.” Soon things change for the worse and Saeed’s mother is killed. He abandons his father and with Nadia escapes through a magical black door. The rest of the book follows them as they navigate lives as hapless refugees and squatters on the periphery of a Greek island, then London and California. The distance between them grows; in migrating they have “murdered” those they have left behind. By the end they also lose each other, their love ebbing away against the transformations brought about by migration.
It is a sad story, at times unevenly vacillating between the realism of Hamid’s first novel, Moth Smoke, and the more abstracted literary terrain of his last, How to Get Filthy Rich in Rising Asia. Yet Hamid’s book is a lyrical and timely tale, its aphoristic prose almost biblical in its repetitive cadences. As the author’s first foray into magical realism, it is wrought perhaps of the realisation that only magic can restore the migrant to being viewed with some semblance of humanity.
The casualties of our divided world are the subject of Man Booker-nominated Pakistani author Mohsin Hamid’s latest novel, Exit West. The book follows the paths of Saeed and Nadia, who fall in love against the backdrop of a nameless city which is “not yet openly at war.” Soon things change for the worse and Saeed’s mother is killed. He abandons his father and with Nadia escapes through a magical black door. The rest of the book follows them as they navigate lives as hapless refugees and squatters on the periphery of a Greek island, then London and California. The distance between them grows; in migrating they have “murdered” those they have left behind. By the end they also lose each other, their love ebbing away against the transformations brought about by migration.
It is a sad story, at times unevenly vacillating between the realism of Hamid’s first novel, Moth Smoke, and the more abstracted literary terrain of his last, How to Get Filthy Rich in Rising Asia. Yet Hamid’s book is a lyrical and timely tale, its aphoristic prose almost biblical in its repetitive cadences. As the author’s first foray into magical realism, it is wrought perhaps of the realisation that only magic can restore the migrant to being viewed with some semblance of humanity.
