Book Review: Exit West by Mohsin Hamid

Reviewed by Siel Ju

Exit West
A novel by Mohsin Hamid
Riverhead Books, March 2017
$26.00; 240 pp.
ISBN-13: 978-0735212176

Widely lauded for its prescience, Mohsin Hamid’s Exit West indeed hews uncomfortably close to our present reality. Turn on the TV, and we get news reports of political unrest, refugee crises, immigration-related conflicts, and growing nationalist movements. Open Hamid’s book, and we are transported to the heart of these social issues, but through a more tender, nuanced, and personal tale.

Exit West follows Saeed and Nadia, a young man and woman newly in love, who leave an unnamed, war-torn country in search of a safer life. The story is largely a realistic one, but with one magical twist: Some doors allow people to enter from one country but exit in a completely different one. Through this sleight of hand, Hamid bypasses the story of migrants’ journeys to focus instead on the aftermaths, with the much-longer challenges of survival and adaptation. Saeed and Nadia move again and again, from Mykonos to London to Marin, Calif., and through their travels illuminate a changed yet strikingly familiar world—one of haves and have nots, fights and alliances, astonishing betrayals and unexpected kindnesses. The violence—both physical and emotional—of each coming and going is a central theme, “for when we migrate, we murder from our lives those we leave behind.”

Hamid deftly captures a surreality unique to our present time of 24-7 media and social networks. In one moment, Nadia sits on some steps, across the street from troops and a tank, reading the news on her phone, only to see in a news story what looks like a picture of herself sitting on steps across the street from troops and a tank, reading the news. Yet for all its relevance to today, Exit West insists on framing urgent current issues within a continuing historical framework, insisting in biblical tones, “and so it had been for millennia, and so it would be for millennia more.” Hamid reminds us that migration is really nothing new. In fact migration, with its inevitable conflicts and hardships and reorganizations, may be the one thing that truly unifies us all: “We are all migrants through time.”

Siel Ju is the author of the novel-in-stories, Cake Time, winner of the 2015 Red Hen Press Fiction Manuscript Award. She is also the author of two poetry chapbooks. Her stories and poems appear in ZYZZYVA, The Missouri Review (Poem of the Week), The Los Angeles Review, Denver Quarterly, and other places. She gives away a book every month at sielju.com.