Exit West: Mohsin Hamid

 

[image error]Life is full of wonders.  One of them is Mohsin Hamid’s ‘Exit West’ being short-listed for Booker 2017.  It’s a badly written book that didn’t make much sense to me.  Sayeed and Nadia meet,  in their country that is soon to be engulfed in a conflict.  They fall in love, well sort of, and then escape the country to the west, when living in their country becomes untenable.  The first half of the book is reasonably good – the sexual tension between the lovers, and the worsening situation in the city of their birth come out well.  My only complaint about the first half was what I thought was a bit of a lazy writing –  Hamid won’t tell us where they are  – and when is this all happening.  It could be Iraq, Syria, Yemen, but we don’t get to know.  I didn’t appreciate the abstraction.  But the novel nose-dives big time in the 2nd half, when Sayeed and Nadia make their way to Mykonos, London and then San Francisco.  The abstraction touches a new and a completely understandable level.  I don’t even know what Hamid was trying there.  Was he going for some magic-realism ala Marquez and Rushdie.  If he was, he sure didn’t succeed, with his light and dark Londons. The story floundered.   The arc of Sayeed-Nadia relationship didn’t make any sense either.  It was repetitive, unengaging and seemed to go in a circle.

Don’t bother.