fiction
Exit West was an interesting novel. It will be released on 3/7/17. I was fortunate to receive an Advance Reader Copy from the ALA Midwinter Convention. This is the first novel I’ve read by Mohsin Hamid. The writing is a bit unsettling—perhaps it's a way to make the reader experience the unsettled feelings of living in a country at war and being an immigrant. I say this because of the improper use of commas and periods. (There were often commas used in place of periods and, sometimes, not enough commas.) I am assuming English is not this Pakistani writer’s first language so I don’t mean to be overly critical but it did impact my reading experience. If the intention was purposeful--to make the novel seem a bit frantic at times with all the run-ons, the author succeeded. Also, the scenes were written in short bursts so it was like the reader was seeing a peep—the most significant part of a scene—and then moving on to the next scene. This, too, added to the frantic feeling even though the pace of the story was not fast.
The story focused on two people, Nadia and Saeed, who were forced to flee their (unidentified) homeland in wartime, fleeing to places unknown. The interesting thing is that in the midst of this serious topic, the author provided a magical means by which the immigrants were able to travel instantaneously from country to country via special doors. I anticipated more magical promise with these doors, but they were just a mechanism by which the struggle of travel was removed in the novel. Instead, the author chose to focus on the experience of being an immigrant and trying to make a new home in a new place where you have no friends, no history, and no security. My favorite parts were the little short stories interspersed throughout the main story. I particularly liked the one with the man on the balcony—probably because it was the happiest one.
It was a fairly forlorn novel about survival. It showed the struggles of people forced to leave their home country. The story touched on both the desire to stay among people of your own kind as well as the beauty of diversity when people learn to work together for the common good.
The story focused on two people, Nadia and Saeed, who were forced to flee their (unidentified) homeland in wartime, fleeing to places unknown. The interesting thing is that in the midst of this serious topic, the author provided a magical means by which the immigrants were able to travel instantaneously from country to country via special doors. I anticipated more magical promise with these doors, but they were just a mechanism by which the struggle of travel was removed in the novel. Instead, the author chose to focus on the experience of being an immigrant and trying to make a new home in a new place where you have no friends, no history, and no security. My favorite parts were the little short stories interspersed throughout the main story. I particularly liked the one with the man on the balcony—probably because it was the happiest one.
It was a fairly forlorn novel about survival. It showed the struggles of people forced to leave their home country. The story touched on both the desire to stay among people of your own kind as well as the beauty of diversity when people learn to work together for the common good.
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