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Summary Of The Novel 'Exit West'

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You own a house or rent a flat. You live with your family or by yourself. You wake in the morning and drink your coffee or tea. You drive a car or a motorbike, or perhaps you take the bus. You go to work and turn on your computer. You go out at night and trifle and date. You live in a small town or big city, although maybe you are in the rural area. You have hopes, ideas and expectations. You take your humankind for granted. You keep believing you are human even when the disaster reaches and renders you homeless. Your town or city or rural area is in ruins. You try to make it to the margin. Only then, hoping to leave, or creating it across the margin, do you know that those who live on the other side do not see you as human at all. This is the dread experience of becoming a immigrant, of joining the 65 million unwanted and stateless people in the world today. It is also the experience that Mohsin Hamid elicits silently and affectingly in his new novel, “Exit …show more content…

Hamid takes full advantage of our familiarity with these scenes to turn “Exit West” into an urgent account of war, love and refugees. Politics also matters as it does in his other novels, which likewise dealt with pressing issues: the troubles of contemporary Pakistan (“Moth Smoke”); 9/11 and the tensions between being Pakistani and American (“The Reluctant Fundamentalist”); and naked capitalism and ambition in an unnamed country (“How to Get Filthy Rich in Rising Asia”). Throughout his oeuvre, Hamid envisions an interconnected world in which East and West inevitably meet as a consequence of complicated histories of colonization and globalization. The dramas and love stories of individuals like Saeed and Nadia cannot be separated from these histories, even if, in their own lives, those histories are not necessarily preoccupations. Until, that is, those histories

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