Summary: Two young lovers flee their violent home through hidden doors that lead to new nations.
Rating & Recommendation: 3.5/5; recommend for those who love that Hemingway flow of writing
Review: I wanted to love this, but I never felt particularly engaged by the characters. The story is timely - it tells of two young lovers, refugees, moving through doors in search of safety and belonging.
"To love is to enter into the inevitability of one day not being able to protect what is most valuable."
As they migrate, so too does their love. It ebbs and flows as love's wont, and the discomfort they feel in the shifting of their relationship is a microcosm of the discomfort they feel as strangers in new lands.
“That is the way of things, for when we migrate, we murder from our lives those we leave behind.”
The one thing I really loved about this was the relationship with Saeed and his father. Until recently, the most underreported ramification of migration was separation. And it isn't always temporary; sometimes families never find their way back to each other, and they're doomed to wonder and worry for the rest of their lives. This is what happens to Saeed and his father. They're torn between staying together, where their fates were doomed, and separating, where they may have hope. It's devastating, the responsibility that parents feel for their children, for protecting them and ensuring their wellbeing, dwarfed only by the responsibility that children feel for their aging parents, the struggle between growing into an adult and being the child that a parent needs.
"He knew that his son must go, and what he did not say was that he had come to that point in a parent's life when, if a flood arrives, one knows one must let go of one's child, contrary to all the instincts one had when one was younger, because holding on can no longer offer the child protection, it can only pull the child down, and threaten them with drowning, for the child is now stronger than the parent..."
The story is fundamentally about hope and loss, and how you can create a home when you have no roots, no mooring. But the story lacks the details to emotionally attach to the characters. I think Hamid was maybe going for that - the universality of the immigrant experience. It’s a coming of age novel, I just never really connected with Nadia or Saeed or their love story, which was disappointing. That being said, the migrant and refugee story was enough to propel me through to the end. They’re from any of a number of nameless cities experiencing the familiar unrest of the civil war, and the sense of fear and urgency is well conveyed. It could definitely be about the Syrian crisis, but it could also be about Central America or parts of Africa. I suppose the details of the characters aren't the point, but it felt hard to connect.
“To flee forever is beyond the capacity of most: at some point even a hunted animal will stop, exhausted, and await its fate, if only for a while.”
Hamid has an elongated, run-on narrative style that I found hard to follow, and there’s almost zero dialogue, but if you can get past the unusual story telling, there’s a meaningful journey in here worth going on. Exit West is definitely an acquired taste, but one maybe worth a try.
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