Book Report: Exit West

 23. Mohsin Hamid, Exit West (2017) (9/11/2020)

NB: I wrote the following after participating in a two-hour Zoom discussion of this book. And so it doesn't feel like my usual "report." But I could be wrong. The discussion was part of a semester-long seminar called "Border Crossings," conducted by University of Houston professor Pete Turchi (and author of one of my favorite books about writing, Maps of the Imagination: The Writer as Cartographer). I am going to do my best to read all nine books on the syllabus. This was the first. So far, I feel the seminar will make me a better reader and writer. I'm pleased to be participating. But from now on, I will write my report before attending the discussion. Before, that is, I get my head blown open by so much perceptive, thoughtful, questioning analysis by my fellow readers.

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This is a book about change and about possibility, one could say. It is about globalization and warfare, flight and safety, displacement and belonging. It is also a love story. In the end, it is about migration, both geographic and temporal, for as the narrator observes, "We are all migrants through time."

Yet although Exit West has a lot of weighty themes, it is a slight book, with fairy tale elements and a sense of spaciousness created by lots of white space, dozens of very short sections, brief asides lifting us out of the central action (a breath of other air), and sentences that go on and on. The occasionally super-long sentences were at times dazzling (but, I confess, at times also a tad annoying), allowing multiple perspectives (if that's the word) on a particular moment to flow together. For example, here the protagonists, Saeed and Nadia, as they are getting to know each other, eat some psychedelic mushrooms:

They spoke quietly under the clouds, glimpsing occasionally a gash of moon or of darkness, and otherwise seeing ripples and churns of city-lit gray. It was all very normal at first, and Saeed wondered if she was perhaps teasing him, or if she had been deceived and sold a dud batch. Soon he had concluded that by some quirk of biology or psychology he was simply, and unfortunately, resistant to whatever it was that mushrooms were supposed to do.
 So he was unprepared for the feeling of awe that came over him, the wonder with which he then regarded his own skin, and the lemon tree in its clay pot on Nadia's terrace, as tall as he was, and rooted in its soil, which was in turn rooted in the clay of the pot, which rested upon the brick of the terrace, which was like the mountaintop of this building, which was growing from the earth itself, and from this earthy mountain the lemon tree was reaching up, up, in a gesture so beautiful that Saeed was filled with love, and reminded of his parents, for whom he suddenly felt such gratitude, and a desire for peace, that peace should come for them all, for everyone, for everything, for we are so fragile, and so beautiful, and surely conflicts could be healed if others had experiences like this, and then he regarded Nadio and saw that she was regarding him and her eyes were like worlds.

Okay, that is about a mushroom trip, so of course it's dreamy; but much of the book has that same quality: of wonder and open-heartedness, of worlds not yet discovered. It is also marked by a deep moral center. Despite the fact that the story concerns a period of great unrest and violence—at first in an unspecified place (that could be Pakistan) and time (that could be the present day—there are cell phones), then opening out into other places that Saeed and Nadia, and others, escape to via mysterious "black doors" (among them Mykonos, London, and Marin, California)—there is a sort of sensuous plurality and universality that is embracing, and bracing. I found the book uplifting, optimistic, and as such it is an excellent one to read in these troubled times of hypernationalism.

Here are a few interviews with Hamid about Exit West, the first in the New Yorker, the second in Lithub, the third in UC Berkeley News. And here is a list of essays he has written. I will certainly be reading more of him.

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In the last five days, the number of confirmed Covid-19 cases has climbed to 8,761 (up 322); hospitalizations, to 522 (up 5); and deaths, to 64 (up 6).  Of all the cases, 82 percent remain in the Salinas Valley. Here on the coast, I am generally seeing everyone wearing masks. It is quite a sight. I'm glad to feel relatively safe.