Exit West

EXIT WEST

by Mohsin Hamid

 

Awards: Aspen Words Winner 2018, LA Times Winner 2017

 

Nominations: Booker Finalist 2017, Carnegie Longlist 2018, Dayton Literary Peace Finalist 2018, Dublin Finalist 2019, Kirkus Finalist 2017, National Book Critics Circle Finalist 2017, NY Times Finalist 2017, Rathbones Folio Finalist 2018

 

Date Read: November 19, 2021

 

Exit West is an interesting take on immigration and a relationship expedited by the pressures of war. In Hamid’s version of earth, literal doors allow people to migrate to different countries, bypassing paperwork, visas and passports, to simply arrive unannounced in a new country.

 

This is what happens for Saeed and Nadia, a couple in Syria who had just started dating and were finding the delights in each other’s company. The collapse of their city and Nadia’s vulnerability as a single woman living alone causes Saeed to invite her to come live with his father and him. Saeed’s mother had just recently been killed. Only a short time after she moves in, it becomes apparent that their city will become uninhabitable and they hire a fixer to find them a door. Saeed’s father refuses to join them.

 

And so begins their life together as refugees. Neither of them ever consciously committed to being a couple but circumstance escalated their relationship and now in their travels, Saeed and Nadia present themselves as husband and wife. Their first door brings them to England where they squat in the house where the door resides. Eventually they join the workforce for a second London north of the actual London.

 

During this time, the comfort of having someone by your side is comforting, particularly someone who shares your culture and history. But sharing their daily lives, living quarters and pressures of homelessness causes their relationship to begin to curdle. This begs the question that had their relationship not been exposed to these external pressures, would their romance have survived?

 

They are unmoored, humans without a country, without family, almost without a past. The only thing they can focus on is surviving in the present. They eventually find themselves in Marin, north of San Francisco, and they finally realize that their relationship is untenable, the romance having been wrung out of their union somewhere along the way.


While Hamid is excellent at his craft, I found myself more interested in the door device than in the fate of the characters. I loved the concept and had hoped for this couple’s survival but, alas, their union was doomed from the beginning.  

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