Book review: Exit West by Mohsin Hamid

Exit West by Mohsin Hamid
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

I got back home to Kerala after a few long months and my father presented me with this perfect perfect welcome back. Exit West is one of the first books of Mohsin Hamid that I have read but certainly not the last.

In this beautiful book, he talks about the fate of millions of Nadia's and Saeed's whose seemingly normal lives were shaken by civil war in an unspecified country from where magical doors take them to refugee camps across the globe. The story focuses on how the world and the people in it, matures around these god forsaken times. And while you relax thanking god for having been spared from these casually yet powerfully conveyed perils of fellow humans, he tells you, ".... everyone migrates, even if we stay in the same houses our whole lives, because we can't help it. We are all migrants through time."

It also gets to me how subtly he takes us through the life of the once passionate couple as they grow apart unable to preserve what they had once, to remain unscathed. "In the late afternoon, Saeed went to the top of the hill, and Nadia went to the top of the hill, and there they grazed out over the island, and out to the sea, and he stood beside where she stood and she stood beside where he stood and the wind tugged and pulled at their hair, and they looked around at each other, but they did not see each other, for she went up before him and he went up after her, and they were each at the crest of the hill only briefly, and at different times."

Chillingly casual and hauntingly mundane in the midst of the end of worlds, this book is definitely a goodread. Thank you @thousandsofpages (Mackenzie) for making me want to pick it up.


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