A review by leweylibrary
Exit West by Mohsin Hamid

challenging emotional mysterious reflective sad tense medium-paced
  • Plot- or character-driven? Character
  • Strong character development? Yes
  • Loveable characters? It's complicated
  • Diverse cast of characters? N/A
  • Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes

4.25

First off, I got this book used, and whoever was annotating it throughout is dumb and missed all the best bits 😅 my English major side could absolutely see a lot of brilliant stuff at work, but it was also just enjoyable to read. I'm so intrigued by this magical realism-esque concept of the doors that transport migrants to new areas and how they were almost nonchalantly included. I loved that the story wasn't a typical love story you often see in novels. <Spoiler>Nadia and Saeed fall in love, sure, but they don't end up together. Nor does it end in this terribly dramatic way, they just grow up and grow apart, and that's okay. I love the way their parting is described because there's so much truth to it (which the annotater clearly did not get lol). I would love to be in an English class discussing this one.

Quotes:
  • It might seem odd that in cities teetering at the edge of the abyss young people still go to class-- in this case, an evening class on corporate identity and product branding-- But that is the way of things, with cities as with life, for one moment we are pottering about our errands as usual and the next we are dying, and our eternally impending ending does not put a stop to our transient beginnings and middles until the instant when it does. (4)
  • He knew how little it took to make a man into meat: the wrong blow, the wrong gunshot, the wrong flick of a blade, turn of a car, presence of a microorganism in a handshake, a cough. He was aware that alone a person is almost nothing. (9)
  • Location, location, location, the realtors say. Geography is destiny, respond the historians. (11)
    -...but that is the way of things, for when we migrate, we murder from our lives. Those we leave behind. (98)
  • ...drawing close she was struck by its darkness, it's opacity, the way that it did not reveal what was on the other side, and also did not reflect what was on this side, and so felt equally like a beginning and an end... (103)
  • ...and when the tension receded there was calm, the calm that is called the calm before the storm, but is in reality the foundation of a human life, waiting there for us between the steps of our march to our mortality, when we are compelled to pause and not act but be. (138)
  • Saeed for his part, wished he could do something for Nadia, could protect her from what would come, even if he understood, at some level, that to love is to enter into the inevitability of one day not being able to protect what is most valuable to you. (165)
  • To flee forever is beyond the capacity of most: at some point, even a hunted animal will stop, exhausted, and a way that's fade, if only for a while. (165)
  • Perhaps they had decided they did not have it in them to do what would have needed to be done, to corral and bloody and we're necessary slaughter the migrants, and had determined that some other way would have to be found. Perhaps They had grasped that the doors could not be closed, a new doors would continue to open, and they had to understood that the denial of coexistence would have required one party to cease to exist, and the extinguishing party too would have been transformed in the process, and too many native parents would not after have been able to look their children in the eye, to speak with head held high of what their generation had done. Her. Perhaps this year, number of places where there were now doors had made it useless to fight in any one. (166)
  • Every time a couple moves they began, if their attention is still drawn to one another, to see each other differently, for personalities are not a single immutable color, like white or blue, but rather illuminated screens, and the shades we reflect depend much on what is around us. (186)
  • When he prayed he touched his parents, who could not otherwise be touched, and he touched a feeling that we are all children who lose our parents, all of us, every man and woman and boy and girl, and we too will all be lost by those who come after us and love us, and this loss. Unites humanity, unites every human being, the temporary nature of our being-ness, and our shared sorrow, the heartache we each carry and yet too often refused to acknowledge in one another, and out of this Saeed felt it might be possible, and the face of death, to believe in humanity's potential for building a better world, and so he prayed as a lament, as a consolation, and as a hope... (203)
  • ...neither talked much of drifting apart, not wanting to inflict a fear of abandonment, while also themselves quietly feeling that fear, the fear of the suffering of their tie, the end of the world they had built together, a world of shared experiences in which no one else would share, and a shared intimate language that was unique to them, and a sense that what they might break was special and likely irreplaceable. (204)
  • There was also closeness, for the end of a couple is like a death, and the notion of death, of temporariness, can remind us of the value of things... (205)
  • ...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. (209)
  • All over the world people were slipping away from where they had been, from. Once fertile plains cracking with dryness, from seaside villages gasping beneath title surges, from overcrowded cities and murderous battlefields, and slipping away from other people too, people they had in some cases loved... (213)
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