Exit West

by Mohsin Hamid.

 

I enjoyed this book in a way you'd enjoy a difficult, long walk uphill to see a view worth seeing.

And this book is well worth reading, for it makes you stop and hold your breath for second and think of all the things that you can count as your blessings, it also makes you see lives and feelings, and fears, and love beyond daily statistics of the news reports with better, sharper understanding. Refugee crisis... "Crisis" is a wrong kind of word, it is rather a tragedy.

“We are all migrants through time.” That is so true! We often forget that no matter how settled and comfortable life we lead, we are all only visitors in this world. Moreover, little we do realise (or perhaps chose to forget and try to convince ourselves that our stability is depends on us entirely and once we want stable, safe life, then it will be there for ever) how fragile our lives are, more so nowadays, when the boundaries can get blurred so rapidly and safety is really only an illusion.

Back to the actual book though.

It is perhaps the calmness, the "matter-of-fact" manner in which the book is narrated, that stuns you most.

Through lives of Saeed and Nadia we open a door into the city that the war has stepped into. Life has been giving up its little pieces one by one: the electricity, the jobs, the food supplies, a short travel to see friends or family, a night's sleep without fear...

"One's relationship to windows now changed in the city. A window was the border through which death was possibly most likely to come..."

Saeed and Nadia meet each other just before the war claims their city. They watch helplessly as each day less and less of normal life remains. Prompted by the death of Saeed's mother and his father's advise they decide to leave their homeland.

What comes next is a long and tedious road of emigration. That road is also a struggle for each to find their own way in the new life. New life, where often tomorrow can be just as uncertain as in the city where the war rules.
Saeed and Nadia find hard not only to adjust to this new life, but also to keep their relationship going. That closeness, intimacy that once made them stronger, seem to slip away and make things harder.

It is a very tender, gentle, yet poignant, account.
It is narrated in that calm, simple way when the beauty shines more prominently and the awe of tragedy strikes even harder.

"Saeed and Nadia were loyal, and whatever name they gave their bond they each in their own way believed it required them to protect the other, and so 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 severing 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."

I gave this book 4 stars, because in some parts, some descriptions felt simply too long and to a degree a bit out of place.
Whilst I enjoyed the book and it is very much thought provoking read, I found it also difficult at times. Difficult not to read but rather to manage the emotional overload that the author puts on to a reader. Thus, no, it is not an easy read.
But yes, totally worth reading!