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Monday 6 November 2017

Exit West - Mohsin Hamid

Hamid is a brilliant writer and profound thinker.  The book is littered with exquisite short, quotable passages.
Loosely based on the current Syrian refugee crisis, he examines the issues around this from many perspectives - who leaves, who goes, the chaos of where they come from, how life in a state of social siege reduces itself and becomes narrower, the different reactions to the need to integrate into your new society.  How some people move forward to greater liberty, how some move back into a more blinkered state, tied to values of their old world even more tightly than when they lived there.
He has a beautiful image of emigration as locating secret doors and passing through them to a new life.  
Mohsin chronicles a lot of this through a delicately outlined love story - and eventual separation -  between the two main characters, Nadia and Saeed.  

Worth a reread, just to catch and note all the quotable passages.


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