Friday, May 26, 2017

Exit West by Mohsin Hamid

Hard to describe a book where the terseness of prose  is mixed with fantasy.  Flitting from place to place through amorphous black doors enable refugees to 'arrive' in another country.  This book cleverly and clearly brings alive to the reader the slowly emerging  horror of watching your country dissolve into war, fractions and wanton violence that you are little able to comprehend or avoid.  The necessity of flight from your country becomes imperative.  Saeed and Nadia the protagonists of this book take one of these 'black doors' arriving in Mykonos, then onto Germany, to London a city rapidly filling with other refugees creating it's own political crisis.  Forced to live their lives outside of their previous culture, makes them question some of their cultural assumptions and their relationship with each other.  Crisis in London makes them feel uncertain of their ability to make a home in a city which doesn't want them.  An interesting discussion on the nature of being a refugee, what is home is people, place or culture?

Words used to describe it:
Pithy, bares reading twice, first half best, profound, disturbing, beguiling, enlightening, melancholic, crystallizing

Marks out of 10:  between 7 - 9 so highly marked,



Next Book
A Short History of Tractors in Ukrainian by Marina Lewycka

Next meeting 
4 May 2017
At
126 Harbord St

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