Author: Mohsin Hamid
Year published: 2017
Category: Adult fiction
Pages: 240 pages
Rating: 4 out of 5
Location: (my 2025 Google Reading map): USA (CA), UK, Netherlands, Greece, and an unnamed Middle Eastern country
Summary: In a country teetering on the brink of civil war, two young people meet—sensual, fiercely independent Nadia and gentle, restrained Saeed. They embark on a furtive love affair, and are soon cloistered in a premature intimacy by the unrest roiling their city. When it explodes, turning familiar streets into a patchwork of checkpoints and bomb blasts, they begin to hear whispers about doors—doors that can whisk people far away, if perilously and for a price. As the violence escalates, Nadia and Saeed decide that they no longer have a choice. Leaving their homeland and their old lives behind, they find a door and step through. . . .
Exit West follows these remarkable characters as they emerge into an alien and uncertain future, struggling to hold on to each other, to their past, to the very sense of who they are. Profoundly intimate and powerfully inventive, it tells an unforgettable story of love, loyalty, and courage that is both completely of our time and for all time.
Review: This novel was a finalist for the Booker Prize in 2017, so I've been meaning to read it for many years. Better late than never. This ended up taking me way longer than it should have, partly because I got caught up in watching some TV shows and partly because it's a slow-moving novel that didn't grip me at first.
Saaed and Nadia are characters that I liked, and I wanted them to find a home that they loved with a community that would support them. Unfortunately, I felt like they weren't really going to get that as they continued to move west (get it, exit west) and continually did not quite fit in. When they fled their country to escape the civil war, they left behind family, friends, their homes, and their sense of belonging, all of which never got replaced. I am sure this is a common feeling for those who immigrate or flee from their homelands.
There is one aspect of this book that is metaphorical and well done: the black doors. Each time the characters leave a place, they go through a black door (as do others) and end up in a different country, bewildered, confused, and having to start all over again.
This is a slow book told in the third person, which makes me feel a bit removed from the action. I think the author captured well the feelings and experiences of immigrants through Saaed and Nadia's relationship.
Challenges for which this counts:
- Diversity--characters and the author are Arab and/or African
- Literary Escapes--Middle Eastern country (seemed like Syria though the author is Pakistani), Greece, and the Netherlands
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