A review by zoldyeck
Exit West by Mohsin Hamid

3.0

"When we migrate, we murder from our lives those we leave behind.”

When I first started reading this book I thought that I was going to really enjoy it, but halfway through I changed my mind. I actually had to push myself to finish this book and was going to dnf it but then I kept on reading and I'm happy I did because I liked the ending.

The fact that I didn't enjoy much of this book doesn't mean that it was bad. On the contrary, I think that it was a good book, a beautiful book. Especially in the first part before the two main characters Nadia and Saeed, who were living in an unnamed country in the midst of civil war, decided to step through a magical door and migrate to another country. Before this, when they were living in their own country the story was really beautiful. Nadia and Saeed had unique personalities and their relationship was simple yet interesting to follow.
After they left their country this relationship changed and that's normal but the problem is that since there is no dialogue in the novel as a reader I kept waiting for the narrator to pay attention to them and tell me what happened, how they felt and all that stuff but all I was given is long sentences (paragraphs at times) that only described the new place to which they transferred and the people they met there. Of course in this part, Mohsin Hamid was perhaps focusing on the main subject matter of the novel which is migration but I felt he didn't do a very good job at that. And maybe this is just me, but the book would have been so beautiful had he focused on the characters' development and allowed the reader to feel the effects of migration on people through Nadia and Saeed.

The cuts/sub-stories that popped up out of nowhere felt nonsensical. This book contains many motifs and symbols that could be analyzed and maybe those short stories of other unnamed people are part of it too but still, I believe they just made the book heavy.

The contrast between Nadia and Saeed's lives before and after stepping through a magical door is so obvious that at times I thought that it could have been intentional since leaving one's country is something not even writing could beautify. Also at the end, Saeed and Nadia's meeting was like their past meetings short, quiet and beautiful and that's perhaps because it took place in their own country and this again makes me wonder whether the heaviness of the second part was a deliberate choice made by the writer.