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1. Exit west : a novel LCCN 2016036296 Type of material Book Personal name Hamid, Mohsin, 1971- author. Main title Exit west : a novel / Mohsin Hamid. Published/Produced New York : Riverhead Books, 2017. Description 231 pages ; 22 cm ISBN 9780735212176 (hardcover) CALL NUMBER PS3558.A42169 E95 2017 CABIN BRANCH Copy 1 Request in Jefferson or Adams Building Reading Rooms - STORED OFFSITE

• Fresh Air, NPR - http://www.npr.org/2017/03/08/519217991/from-refugees-to-politics-mohsin-hamid-writes-the-change-he-wants-to-see

  < From Refugees To Politics, Mohsin Hamid Writes The Change He Wants To See March 8, 20172:00 PM ET 36:16 Download Facebook Twitter Google+ Email TERRY GROSS, HOST: This is FRESH AIR. I'm Terry Gross. My guest Mohsin Hamid has written a novel about immigration that was described in The New York Times as creating a fictional world that captures perils of the world we live in now, with wars, like the one in Syria, turning cities into war zones, with political crises, warp-speed technological changes and growing tensions between nativists and migrants. The novel is about a young couple in a city slowly being overtaken by militants and extremists. Beheadings are becoming common. The city is unnamed, but it resembles Lahore, Pakistan, where Hamid lives. The novel examines the difficulty of knowing when it's time to flee, how it feels to leave family behind and what it's like to arrive in another country that's hostile to immigrants. Mohsin Hamid was born in Lahore, Pakistan, but spent part of his childhood in California, where his father was studying at Stanford. Hamid returned to the U.S. to study at Princeton and Harvard Law School. He lived in New York in his 20s and London in his 30s but moved back to Lahore with his wife to raise their children. His other novels include "The Reluctant Fundamentalist" and "How To Get Filthy Rich In Rising Asia." His new novel is called "Exit West." Mohsin Hamid, welcome back to FRESH AIR. You had no way of knowing that the publication of your novel about migration would coincide with President Trump's second version of an executive order blocking migrants from several Muslim-majority countries. Do you think your novel addresses that ban without mentioning it by name? MOHSIN HAMID: In a sense, yes because the ban is about trying to determine, you know, who belongs and who doesn't belong in a place, above all. Of course, it also has the effect of restricting certain people's movements and in some cases, like refugees, with potentially deadly effect. But above all, it's about who has the right to move and who doesn't have the right to move. And I think that when we take the long view, the notion that some people are deemed, you know, less worthy of being able to move, to not have the right to cross borders - over time, that's going to seem to us as outmoded and as unfair, really, as racial discrimination or other kinds of discrimination. So, yes, the book does address the ban without specifically addressing that. GROSS: I'm really interested in hearing what the discussion is like in Pakistan now, about Trump's anti-immigrant policies, the discussion both among your friends and family but also in the press. HAMID: Well, my 7-year-old daughter was frightened that I was going to America. And she had come to New York with me and my wife and other child, our son, in August. We stayed for a month, and she loved it. And if you asked her in, perhaps, September, her favorite place in the world, she might have said New York. But when I was coming to America just now from Pakistan, she was saying, you know, Baba, don't go. And among the 7-year-olds in her class, there's a fear that there's this person out there - she knows his name is Trump - and she thinks that he hates Muslims, that he is not nice to women - that - in a sense, that he's a villain. And I think that sentiment, at the level of a child, because she could probably name no other international political figure - that's becoming quite widespread, the notion that there's a person who's the head of the most powerful country in the world who dislikes so many people around the world. And naturally, that creates a sense of resentment and dismay. GROSS: There's a fear among a lot of Americans that Trump's policies will radicalize people, you know, radicalize Muslims who might otherwise be very pro-America and supportive of American values. Do you see any evidence of that? HAMID: Well, I think that there are perhaps two parts to it. Outside of America, there are many people, myself included, who champion values that, in some senses, could be thought of as traditionally American - the idea that everybody's equal, that the rights of women and men should be the same, that there should be no discrimination on religious or sexual orientation, that democracy and rule of law and due process are the ways in which society should govern themselves and minorities should be cared for. These, in a way, are values that America has championed internationally - not exclusively, of course, America has a mixed history. But I think, for many people around the world, the sense is that they've lost an ally, that this very powerful force that used to speak for these things is now silent. And that's different from radicalization. At the same time, I think radicalization works in a slightly different way. When people, particularly young people and especially young men, can't imagine themselves as heroes in narratives that they construct for themselves, they look to be heroes in some other way. So young men in America of, let's say, Muslim background, only a tiny, tiny minority - so small as to be almost zero - are likely to ever commit terrorist acts. But what goes to the mind of somebody like that? You know, very often, if you look at the kinds of communications that they're getting in an ISIS recruiting video, the videos that, you know, that one hears of as radicalizing them, these are like action movies. And so in the sense, it's that by closing off the idea that young Muslims and particularly young Muslim men can be American heroes, it increases the chance that they'll try to be some other kind of hero. And that, I think, is entirely counterproductive. GROSS: Let's talk about your novel "Exit West," which is about a young man and a young woman who kind of fall in love in Pakistan and eventually decide - well, I shouldn't say Pakistan. It's an unnamed country... HAMID: Yes... GROSS: ...That I assume is modeled on Pakistan (laughter) because that's where you live. But anyways, they kind of fall in love or they think they've fallen in love. And slowly, things in their country start to get to the point where it's becoming increasingly dangerous to live there. And the question is always in the background, how do you know when it's time to leave? And in the novel, things start changing slowly. It's tolerable at first. And then a turning point is the first time that a person you know is killed. And you write, (reading) in time of violence, there is always that first acquaintance or intimate of ours who, when they are touched, makes what had seemed like a bad dream suddenly evisceratingly (ph) real. And for these two people, one of the things that makes the danger real is that they know a middle-aged local man who ran a small side business who was beheaded with a serrated knife to enhance his pain. Then his body was strung up by one ankle from an electricity pole. So was there a first person for you, who you knew, who was touched by the violence of the Taliban in Pakistan? HAMID: Well, not necessarily by the Taliban, but certainly by extremists. The first person that I knew personally that I can think of in this moment - I had lunch with the governor of our province. And he was the husband of my mother-in-law's best friend. And he had been campaigning to remove or change the country's blasphemy law, which he argued was being used to victimize religious minorities, particularly Christians. And this was an unpopular position among, you know, certain strands of the religious right in Pakistan. And his own bodyguard assassinated him. And, you know, I remember meeting his family and coming for the funeral. And this is a person who was alive and speaking, you know, the day before. And then a day later, he was gone. It was incredible shock. It's always a shock when somebody dies. But in this case, really, it marked a change. It felt real. And also - it might be worth pointing out that, you know, so often people say, well, you know, why don't Muslims, you know, speak out? And why don't they - and I think people who say that have no idea what's going on in countries like Pakistan where there are thousands, tens of thousands, hundreds of thousands of people, millions speaking out. And in the case of my family friend, people who, you know, risk their lives to stand up for the rights of Christian minorities in Pakistan. And in fact, I've been to the funeral of somebody who did that. So it was enormously jarring and shocking. And also a reminder that many good people around the world are willing to risk everything to live inside a decent society. GROSS: What do you think your profile on Pakistan is? HAMID: It's hard to say. I mean, I - my books are read by young people in Pakistan. And in particular, on university campuses when I go, many young people have read them. I'm perhaps most likely to be recognized, if I go anywhere in the world, it's in Lahore or Karachi or places in Pakistan. There's an interesting phenomenon in the first, you know, 50 years of Pakistan's history. Perhaps a million students graduated from university in that entire time. Now there's about a million students enrolled in university in Pakistan. In other words, instead of a few thousand or tens of thousands a year, there's hundreds of thousands who graduate every year. And many of these young people read novels because in the novels, not just my novels but the novels of many other Pakistani writers, they encounter ideas, notions, ways of thinking about the world, thinking about their society that are different. And fiction functions in a countercultural way as it does in America and certainly as it did in the, you know, '60s. And so I would say I feel engaged with young people in Pakistan. But that said, it's still a small minority that reads novels, literary fiction. But it isn't necessarily a small minority of the wealthy elite in the city of Lahore. It can often be and I often do meet at literary festivals students who've ridden a bus 12 hours from a very small town just to hear some of their favorite writers come and speak. GROSS: We were talking a couple of minutes ago about people you know who have been assassinated or killed or wounded by militants in Pakistan. In your novel "Exit West," there's a reference to how as things get more overtaken by the militants, that funerals have become smaller and more rushed affairs because of the fighting. Has that begun to happen in Pakistan? HAMID: No, and, I mean, well, it depends is, I guess, the short answer. I think what's very important is, you know, novels function and the power of novels function because of their stories. And so the themes that we're discussing here of course are layered into the book. But they are encountered in the specific context of these two people. And I think it's important to highlight that because Saeed and Nadia are two main characters living in the city, which is a lot like Lahore initially, the city where I live in Pakistan. And it begins to become much more fraught. Saeed and Nadia are navigating their worlds. And they're two different people. Nadia has left her family, lives on her own, is not particularly religious. Saeed is very close to his family, lives with his parents, has a strong spiritual side. And as the city begins to change around them, many of the things that they take for granted in their day-to-day life, like being able to surf the Internet on their phones, being able to score weed or order hallucinogenic mushrooms via a courier service, listen to music, go out and hang out in restaurants, these things begin to fall away. And funerals, which is what you just mentioned, those do begin to change - that for them, as people are more and more frightened of public space and more and more retreating into their private worlds, even the act of saying goodbye that a funeral represents becomes very different. And people are frightened to come and frightened to come to funerals, that even expressing one's respects to those who have passed isn't enough to get people into the public space. And in Lahore where I live, there are perhaps some of the beginning elements of this. But it hasn't walked so far down the path, the city hasn't. GROSS: If you're just joining us, my guest is writer Mohsin Hamid. His new novel is called "Exit West." It's about migration. We're going to take a short break, and then we'll be right back. This is FRESH AIR. (SOUNDBITE OF THE WEE TRIO'S "LOLA") GROSS: This is FRESH AIR, and if you're just joining us, my guest is novelist Mohsin Hamid. His new novel is called "Exit West," and it's about a young couple from an unnamed city that seems very much like Lahore, Pakistan, where Mohsin Hamid lives. And they decide that things have gotten so bad, the militants have made so many moves restricting freedom, that they need to migrate. So it's about their decision, their experiences in the city, their decision to leave and the countries they go to. And I should mention Mohsin Hamid grew up in both Pakistan and the U.S. He spent his 20s in the U.S. and his 30s in London and since then has lived in Pakistan. One of the decisions that this couple has to make is not only when to leave but should they leave even though Saeed's father isn't going to go with them. And I think that's something that must be very difficult for all people who become immigrants. Are you saying goodbye to your family who's staying behind? Are you saying goodbye to them forever? And one of the reasons why the father decides to stay behind in this unnamed city and not emigrate is that his wife, the main character's mother, was shot in the head and killed by a stray bullet. And so I'd like you to read a short excerpt from your novel about the father's decision to stay behind and his encouragement of his son to leave. HAMID: (Reading) Saeed asked why his father was doing this. What could possibly make him want to stay? And Saeed's father said, your mother is here. Saeed said, Mother is gone. His father said, not for me. And this was true in a way. Saeed's mother was not gone for him. Saeed's mother was not gone for Saeed's father - not entirely. And it would have been difficult for Saeed's father to leave the place where he had spent a life with her, difficult not to be able to visit her grave each day. And he would not wish to do this. He preferred to abide, in a sense, in the past, for the past offered more to him. But Saeed's father was thinking also of the future, even though he did not say this to Saeed, for he feared that if he had said this to his son, that his son might not go. And he knew, above all else, 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. And the circumstances are such that the utmost of strength is required. GROSS: What made you think about this, about how sometimes things get to a point where in order for the child to survive, they have to separate from their parent, that the child - the parent can no longer protect the child, that the parent is actually holding the child back and might lead to the child drowning, or, in this case, lead to the child being stuck in a city that is doomed? HAMID: Living in a place like Pakistan, very often you meet people who are migrating abroad. And sometimes you'll ask their parents, you know - you didn't try to stop them? Like, why didn't you say, don't go - I'll miss you? Stay with me. And, you know, people say, well, it's best for them. They have to go. And parents, you know, take on that sadness because they know it's better for their children if they leave. And so for me, it was borne partly out of my own sense of sorrow. If I had to leave Pakistan again - and my parents are getting older now - what it would feel like to leave them behind. And also thinking about my own children - how would I feel if they were older and they decided no, they couldn't live where I was and moved abroad? And so for Saeed and Nadia, the - particularly for Saeed - the amount, the power of what is driving him to leave, imagine how strong it has to be for someone to let go of their parent. And imagine how frightened a parent has to be for what awaits their child to say, you know, it's OK. We won't be part of each other's day-to-day lives, but you must leave. GROSS: In your novel, when your main characters migrate, they basically slip through portals, through doors, and are immediately in another country. So it's a kind of, like, magical touch (laughter) to your novel. But it's also - it seems like a very convenient device for a novelist because you don't have to get them, like, visas and put them on, like, a boat or a plane and have them pass through customs, you know. Like, you you don't have to deal with any of that in the narrative, and you can keep it really lean. And like... HAMID: Absolutely. GROSS: ...They're suddenly in another country. Was that one of your reasons for doing it that way? HAMID: Yeah. I mean, partly, I feel the doors kind of already exist. They are a representation of a technological reality we already live inside. We can open up our computers and Skype with someone, and we see them. It's like looking through a window. And we can surf the internet through our phones, and it's like our consciousness is far away. Or we can step through a airplane door and be in another continent a few hours away. So technology feels, to me, like the doors sort of already exist, at least emotionally. But in the novel, it was important to me to focus on, what makes someone want to leave, which is all of their life before migration, and what happens to them in the new place, which is the life after migration? - which is something that every human being participates in. The part of the story that often gets emphasized - how did you cross the Atlantic or how did you cross the Pacific or how did you cross the Mediterranean in a little boat, which capsized and people died? That is a very dramatic and horrific, in some cases, part of the story. But it's a tiny moment usually in the time and in the emotional journey. I wanted to focus on the more human and lasting stories of Saeed and Nadia. What happens before you move, and what happens after? And so the doors allowed me to focus on parts of the migration narrative that often get de-emphasized. The other thing, of course, is the doors allow the world to change very quickly. So the next century or two of migration that are likely to happen on planet Earth, in the novel, occurs in just a year or two. GROSS: My guest is Mohsin Hamid. His new novel is called "Exit West." We'll talk more after a break. And Kevin Whitehead will pay tribute to the Dutch composer and pianist Misha Mengelberg, who died last Friday. There's one recording in particular that you really have to hear. I'm pretty sure you've never heard anything quite like it. I'm Terry Gross, and this is FRESH AIR. (SOUNDBITE OF ANTONIO SANCHEZ' "NAR-THIS") GROSS: This is FRESH AIR. I'm Terry Gross. Let's get back to my interview with Mohsin Hamid, author of the new novel "Exit West," about a young couple whose city is slowly overtaken by extremists. The novel is about how you know when it's time to flee and what it's like to become an immigrant in a country that's hostile to immigrants. The fictional city this couple is from resembles Lahore, Pakistan, where Mohsin Hamid was born and lives today. He spent part of his childhood in the U.S. and returned to study at Princeton and Harvard Law School. He spent his 20s in New York, his 30s in London and returned to Pakistan with his wife to raise their children. His other novels include "Moth Smoke" and "The Reluctant Fundamentalist." A question that's raised in the novel, about your main characters, which I'd be interested in hearing your reflections about, is in a new country, do you share this bond with migrants from other countries or only with migrants from your country? You know, like... HAMID: Yes. GROSS: It's an example of, like, when I'm in another city far away and I find myself sitting next to somebody from my neighborhood in Philadelphia, it's like - wow, we have so much in common. We're from the same neighborhood or from the same city, whereas if I run into them in the neighborhood, they're just a stranger to me. It doesn't mean a thing. HAMID: You know, sometimes we are looking for somebody we can connect with on the basis of a shared past or a tradition or experience. And so finding that you're sitting next to someone very much like you in terms of where they come from is enormously reassuring. I think sometimes feeling that you've been marginalized opens you up to the realization that, in their own lives, almost everyone experiences marginalization, a kind of foreigner sense. And that has - in my fiction in particular, in particular my later fiction - made me investigate and explore the idea that we're all united in this, that every human being migrates through time, that the place we grew up in in our childhood is gone when we're in our 50s and 60s and 70s. You can live in the same city your entire life and still be completely a foreigner when you step out, in your old age, onto the street. And that is the basis, I think, for asserting a kind of shared human experience. So whereas if you'd asked me this 25 years ago - would I say international people are my clan? - I probably would have said yes. But now, I quite enjoy meeting people who haven't moved, don't feel at all international and recognizing an enormous shared experience that they also have with me. GROSS: I'd like to talk with you a little bit about prayer. And in your novel, the male protagonist, Saeed, after emigrating from the country that he's from, which seems very much like Pakistan, he goes to several countries. And at this point in the novel, he's in Marin in California, and he finds himself praying more. And this is a period in his life, you know, he's cut off from his parents because his mother was killed by a stray bullet. His father didn't want to emigrate because he wanted to be able to visit the grave and to live in the past, where he felt more comfortable. So please read this paragraph where Saeed is praying and thinking about his parents. HAMID: (Reading) Now, though, in Marin, Saeed prayed even more, several times a day. And he prayed fundamentally as a gesture of love for what had gone and would go and could be loved in no other way. When he prayed, he touched his parents, who could not otherwise be touched, and he touched a feeling that we are all children who lose our parents, all of us - every man and woman and boy and girl. And we, too, will all be lost by those who come after us and love us. And this loss unites humanity, unites every human being, the temporary nature of our beingness and our shared sorrow, the heartache we each carry and yet too often refuse to acknowledge in one another. And out of this, Saeed felt it might be possible, in the face of death, to believe in humanity's potential for building a better world. And so he prayed as a lament, as a consolation and as a hope. GROSS: Can I ask how prayer, in your life, has changed over the years? HAMID: You know, I - my own take on this is I actually feel that personal matters, like religion and spirituality, are things that I really discuss only with intimates. I think it's, in a way, like sexuality, something where it touches upon something very private. But I can say that around me, as I see people praying and I think about the power of it - and I belong to a family where some people pray and are very religious and some are not religious at all - what I've come to recognize is that, for many people, there is an almost power to be found in prayer. And that doesn't mean, necessarily, that we should all be religious or that a particular religious tradition is the right tradition but that, for some people, it does do something that helps them navigate the experience of loss, the experience of getting older, the experience of facing their own mortality. And in Saeed's character, I wanted to articulate that and to articulate some of the beauty that I saw in prayer and people around me who turned to that. GROSS: You wrote about that when you traveled to India, which is - has a very large Muslim population but it has a larger Hindu population. Do I have that right, that the Hindu population is larger? HAMID: Yes. GROSS: Yeah. So when you go there, say, to speak or to do a reading, you have to check in at each police station - in the police station of each city before you make an appearance. Is that because you're Muslim? HAMID: Well, that's because I'm Pakistani. So... GROSS: Because you're Pakistani. Right. OK. HAMID: Even if you travel on a British passport, let's say, or, you know, if you're connected to Pakistan in a way, given the history of animosity between India and Pakistan - and it's reciprocal. I mean, Indians undergo similar things in Pakistan. It's not that only India does it to Pakistanis. And it sometimes would be very strange. So I might arrive in a hotel room for a book launch, and the hotel manager will come up and say, oh, I've read one your books, and I really liked it. I'm so glad you're here. And then two hours later, I'm off in a police station, you know, waiting. And then I'm on TV. It's a very sort of strange thing. But it's happened to me in America as well. You know, there are sometimes when I seem to be, you know, always selected for random security searches at airports or stopped, you know, flying in and taken to secondary inspection and questioned for hours. And then on that same trip, I might be having a conversation with you or giving a reading in New York or even, you know, giving a talk, you know, at some U.S. government, you know, school of foreign service or something like that. And it's very strange because you experience both the idea that people want to hear what you have to say and you're being welcomed as an artist and, at the same time, you belong to a suspect class where there's a suspicion that really, deep down, you're a terrorist. And these two things seem - how can they possibly co-exist? And they don't. It's just that we're incoherent. And in India in particular, that incoherence comes across very strongly if you're a Pakistani writer. GROSS: Do you carry a copy of one of your books around so you can say - hey, this is me? HAMID: I do, although I have to say I usually don't carry a copy of "The Reluctant Fundamentalist." GROSS: (Laughter) Right. "The Reluctant Fundamentalist" is one of your novels that was also made into a film. That would give, maybe, the wrong cue to whoever was looking at it (laughter). HAMID: Yes. I mean, it's quite funny because, you know, sometimes they'll stop you at the airport and say - oh, what do you do? I'm a writer. Really? What have you written? Oh, I've written multiple books. What is your most recent one? Um, "The Reluctant Fundamentalist," you know. And that used to be... GROSS: It's a memoir (laughter). HAMID: That used troubling. But I'll tell you this, you know. I really do believe that people surprise you. And one of the powerful things about novels is that they're about characters, and those characters live their lives. But so are the people you meet at airports. You know, I've met immigration officers. And I've said, you know, I wrote this novel "The Reluctant Fundamentalist." And somebody looks at me and they're thinking, it's not going to go well. But they'll say, you know, my kid wants to do an MFA, and I don't know if it's a good idea. It's a lot of money. What do you think? And you wind up having a 15-minute conversation about the writing life and the values and pros and cons of MFA programs. So I'm often surprised that, you know, you encounter all types of humanity. And very often, there are some very decent people who don't stereotype even when you might, in your own mind, have stereotyped them to think that they will. GROSS: My guest is Mohsin Hamid. His new novel about immigrants is called "Exit West." We'll talk more after a break. This is FRESH AIR. (SOUNDBITE OF JEFF BABKO'S "NOSTALGIA IS FOR SUCKAS") GROSS: This is FRESH AIR. My guest is Mohsin Hamid. His new novel, "Exit West," is about a couple who flee their country after it's taken over by extremists. They become immigrants in countries hostile to immigrants. Hamid was born and lives in Lahore, Pakistan, but has also lived in the U.S. and London. On the dust jacket of your new book, there's a photo, an author photo, and you have a pretty short beard. And if you don't mind my asking, is the beard because you're better off with one if you live in Pakistan or because you like the style of it? HAMID: No, I don't think it makes any difference if you have a beard in a city like Lahore. I mean, for some people, it's a signifier of different kinds of religious things. For me, it's never been that. You know, I'm pretty close to bald and so... GROSS: (Laughter). HAMID: ...I think the beard helps offset - it's the only hairstyle I can really pull off. But I'm often clean-shaven. I think, you know, for me, it's not that signifier. What's interesting to me though is although the beard isn't a signifier of that to me, other people very often think that it is. And so people in America might react differently. The, you know, border agents might react differently. The guys at airport security might react differently. And people in Pakistan sometimes react differently. So a beard is something that is almost like a mirror to the viewer. When someone sees you wearing a beard, they're seeing something in their own imagination because it's still me whether I'm bearded or not. GROSS: So the beard could be a positive in Pakistan and a negative in the U.S., particularly at an airport? HAMID: Yeah, or the other way around. So for example, in some contexts in Pakistan maybe a beard is negative. It depends. And in some contexts in America maybe a beard is positive. I think there's certainly lots of hipster communities where having a beard makes me look a little bit less like a, you know, middle-aged fuddy-duddy. And there's some places in Pakistan where having a beard, you know, certain corporate contexts, certain social contexts, where it's not an advantage to have a beard. GROSS: Something that you have to navigate so that people don't assume you're a terrorist (laughter) and so that people don't assume you're a middle-aged fuddy-duddy (laughter). HAMID: You know, it's amazing the range of places that I can, you know, occupy from deeply dangerous to so undangerous as to be completely desexualized. You know, it's a wonderful canvas on which I can live out my different facial hair experiments. GROSS: It is lucky you have a sense of humor about that. HAMID: There's no other way around it. You know, I think life is too short to go around being continually, you know, angry about being seen in this way. But that said, the anger is useful too because when things about the world upset you, that is really a fertile feeling to channel into fiction and to put out into books. GROSS: In the part of your novel where your main characters are still living in the unnamed country that's being overtaken by militants, they realize that the meaning of windows has changed, that a window, which used to be, like, a great view, something wonderful to have in your home, now a window is really dangerous because it's the place through which bullets can pass. Shattered glass itself can become, like, shards that are dangerous and wound you. And you write, (reading) a window had become a border through which death was possibly most likely to come. What made you think about that, about how windows can become really dangerous in a dangerous area? HAMID: Well, that had to do with a friend of mine who was living in Lahore, and there was a bomb blast not far from his house. And it blew the windows in. And, you know, his wife was asleep, and the glass flew over the bed, hit the wall and sort of fell down onto her. So she woke - you know, she woke to the blast and to this sort of glass falling on her. But had she been standing, she would likely have been very badly lacerated. And in that realization, you know, we think of a bomb blast as being something that kills people right nearby. But the truth is a pressure wave does very strange things to glass. And my architect friends, many of my friends in Lahore actually are architects, you know, they would often say things like, well, if it was invented today, the glass window wouldn't be allowed in any structure. It's just not safe. So I guess you could say that one is brushed up against the reality of that in Pakistan. And there are many people in public places that install blast-resistant film on glass windows to make them safer. GROSS: Do you worry about the glass in your children's bedrooms? HAMID: Yeah, I mean, I, you know, do think about those things but try not to think about them too often. There's - every parent, wherever you live in the world, there are fears that we have for our children. What happens when we drop them off to school? What happens, you know, when they're making their way home? What happens when we're not with them? And this particular fear that you've mentioned is part of that. And in a way, every parent is sort of dependent on the benevolence of the society around them to take care of their children. And we get these reminders that maybe it isn't as benevolent as we'd like. But we're sort of helpless in the face of that. And that's, for me, a call to engage and to be sort of politically active because society requires each of us to intervene. It won't just be the way we want it to be. GROSS: So one more question - how do you deal with anxiety? HAMID: I think that we live in a world - and this is something which living in Pakistan, perhaps, has taught me - and, you know, we live in a world where there is a constant feed from social media, the news, etc., of things that can scare us. GROSS: (Laughter). HAMID: And we become so anxious because human beings are meant - are designed to be sensitized to dangerous stuff. You know, you get a bad review as a writer, you remember it for 10 years. You get a hundred good reviews, you forget them all. You say hello to a hundred people in the city and it doesn't mean anything to you. One racist comment passes by, and it sticks with you a decade. We keep the negative stuff because it's the negative stuff that's going to, you know, potentially kill us. That fin in the water - maybe it is a shark. That yellow thing behind the tree - maybe it is a lion. You need to be scared. But contemporary culture in Pakistan, just like in America, is continuously hitting us with scary stuff. And so we are utterly anxious. I think that it's very important to resist that anxiety, to think of ways of resisting the constant inflow of negative feelings, not to become depoliticized as a result but to actually work actively to bring into being an optimistic future. And for me, writing books and being, you know, someone who's politically active is part of that. I don't want to be anxious on my day-to-day life. I want to try to imagine a future I'd like to live in and then write books and do things that, in my own small way, make it more likely that that future will come to exist. GROSS: I wish you success with that. Thank you so much for talking with us. HAMID: Thank you, Terry. GROSS: Mohsin Hamid's new novel is called "Exit West." After we take a short break, Kevin Whitehead will have a remembrance of the Dutch composer and pianist Misha Mengelberg. This is FRESH AIR. (SOUNDBITE OF BILL WILBER AND KENNY DAVERN'S "ROSETTA")

• New York Times - https://www.nytimes.com/2017/03/07/arts/exit-west-mohsin-hamid-refugee-.html

  Global Migration Meets Magic in Mohsin Hamid’s Timely Novel

  By ALEXANDRA ALTERMARCH 7, 2017
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  Photo
  Mohsin Hamid, whose new novel, “Exit West,” centers on a love story amid a refugee crisis, has drawn praise for an urgent and essential story. Credit Anna Huix for The New York Times

  In an unnamed, war-ravaged city in the Muslim world, two young lovers face a wrenching choice. They can stay in their barricaded apartment as their country descends into sectarian bloodshed and chaos, or entrust their lives and fortunes to a human smuggler who promises to spirit them to safety through a magic portal in an abandoned dentist’s office. The couple choose the mysterious doorway and are instantly transported to a Greek island, where they find themselves among hundreds of other desperate refugees.

  With its surreal premise, “Exit West,” an acclaimed new novel by Mohsin Hamid, might feel hallucinatory and distant had it arrived at a different moment. Instead, the novel — which fuses magical realism with a harrowingly vivid story of global migration and displacement — feels ominously relevant.

  Mr. Hamid, a cultural chameleon and polyglot who was born in Pakistan and spent more than half his life in the United States and London, didn’t intend to write a dystopian parable about the current refugee crisis. When he began working on “Exit West” four years ago, he started with an abstract idea: a global network of passageways that circumvent borders, allowing migrants to immediately cross oceans and continents and erasing the already porous barriers between nations and cultures.

  “The idea of these doors, which I feel already exist, unlocked the form of this novel,” Mr. Hamid, 45, said in a Skype interview from his home in Lahore, Pakistan. “I wanted to write a very large book about the entire world on a very small scale, so I needed to find some way of covering a lot of ground.”
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  Mr. Hamid’s literary profile has been growing ever since he dazzled critics with his 2000 debut novel, “Moth Smoke,” which explored the lives of hard-partying Pakistani youth and was a finalist for the PEN/Hemingway Award. Since then, his three novels have collectively sold a million copies and been translated into 35 languages.

  But “Exit West” is likely to draw a much broader audience, and seems poised to become one of this year’s most significant literary works. To meet demand from booksellers, Mr. Hamid’s publisher, Riverhead, had already ordered four printings before the book’s release on Tuesday. Prominent novelists like Zadie Smith, Michael Chabon, Joyce Carol Oates and Kiran Desai have praised the novel as an urgent and essential story, particularly at a moment when immigrants and Muslims have been demonized.

  Mr. Hamid, who lived in the United States for 17 years and describes himself as “culturally and emotionally at least half American,” said the last few months have left him frightened and depressed. He wonders whether he will still feel welcome in an America that appears increasingly hostile to foreigners and Muslims. His native country, where he is raising his two young children, has suffered a wave of terrorist attacks by the Islamic State and the Taliban. The world seems to be veering toward the upheaval and entrenched polarization that Mr. Hamid envisioned in the novel.

  He never imagined “Exit West” would become so grimly prescient, with the crisis in Syria displacing millions, and nationalist movements gaining ground in the West. He started writing the story long before rising nativist sentiment led to ‘Brexit’ and Donald J. Trump signed executive orders targeting illegal immigrants and barring refugees from entering the country.

  “The basic impulse, this growing need for so many people to move because of political calamity and environmental catastrophe, and the rise of nativism and tribalism — those things were quite clearly happening,” he said. “While I hadn’t imagined we’d be where we are now, I guess I’m not surprised.”

  But while “Exit West” seems like a dark reflection of our tumultuous times, Mr. Hamid said the novel grew out of a hopeful impulse.

  “What if we look at a very difficult future — can we still find hope and beauty and love and things that we want?” he said. “For me, this is not a novel about dystopia; actually it’s about looking for signs of hope and optimism in the future.”
  Photo
  Mr. Hamid, at Daunt Books at Marylebone High Street in London, says he never imagined “Exit West” would become so grimly prescient. Credit Anna Huix for The New York Times

  The novel represents bold new territory for Mr. Hamid, whose earlier works, including “The Reluctant Fundamentalist” and “How to Get Filthy Rich in Rising Asia,” were formally innovative and experimental but firmly grounded in reality. “I’ve tried to abide by the laws of physics up until now,” he said.

  He drew inspiration from Jorge Luis Borges, and from children’s literature, one of his favorite genres. He grew up devouring books by J .R. R. Tolkien and C. S. Lewis, and lately has been reading Harry Potter to his 7-year-old daughter. The spare prose in “Exit West” feels almost biblical at times. The magic doors give the story a mythical sweep, as the refugee couple, Nadia and Saeed, escape to Mykonos, then London, then finally the Bay Area, encountering angry nationalist mobs but also benefiting from the unexpected generosity of strangers.

  Mr. Chabon said that the surreal elements of the novel allowed Mr. Hamid to write about the refugee experience in ways that “few writers would have the courage or chutzpah to get to.”
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  “What makes this book special is that it takes on a subject that a lot of readers are going to wish they could avert their eyes from,” he said. “Magical realism is about getting you to look at something with fresh eyes and see something marvelous in the everyday, and there’s something radical about treating the refugee experience as something with the potential to be marvelous.”

  Like his protagonists, Mr. Hamid has spent much of his life feeling displaced, rootless and alienated. “Grappling with movement, and the wrenching and painful nature of that, has been very central to my life,” he said.

  Born in Lahore in 1971, Mr. Hamid moved at age 3 to Northern California, where his father was studying for a Ph.D. at Stanford. A chatty child, he suddenly found himself cut off from language, unable to communicate with other children. He assimilated, only to be uprooted again at 9, when his family returned to Pakistan. By then, he had forgotten how to speak Urdu, his first language.

  “When I was younger I used to imagine I was some kind of a freak, I’m not really anything,” he said. “I became a very good chameleon.”

  At 18, he returned to the United States to attend Princeton, where he took writing workshops with Ms. Oates and Toni Morrison. Ms. Oates recalled him as “quietly well spoken, though forceful in his critiques of others’ work.” He later went to Harvard Law School, and continued to write fiction, working on a draft of “Moth Smoke.”

  He worked as a consultant at McKinsey & Company in New York, and convinced the company to give him three to four months off a year to write. He later moved to London, where he met his wife, a classically trained singer and musician who is also from Lahore. After the birth of their daughter, Mr. Hamid felt a pang of homesickness, and convinced his wife to move back to Lahore to be near their parents. (He is a dual citizen of Pakistan and Britain.)

  “I remember him saying, ‘I have to go back, it’s a waste of happiness to be away from them,’” said the filmmaker Mira Nair, who directed a film adaptation of “The Reluctant Fundamentalist.”

  Mr. Hamid has lived in Lahore for the past seven years. He writes while his two children are at school — pacing around his office and reading passages out loud — and works as a consultant for the branding agency Wolff Olins. His wife runs a restaurant.

  He’s deeply attached to Lahore. But Mr. Hamid feels conflicted about whether he belongs there. “The life of a writer is more fraught here than it might be in other places,” he said.

  Sometimes, he considers leaving again, but worries about the emotional toll on his family.

  “It’s not so easy to pick up and leave,” he said. “As is the case in the novel, leaving home is an emotionally violent act.”

• Mohsin Hamid Home Page - http://www.mohsinhamid.com/

  Mohsin Hamid is the author of four novels, Moth Smoke, The Reluctant Fundamentalist, How to Get Filthy Rich in Rising Asia, and Exit West, and a book of essays, Discontent and Its Civilizations.

  His writing has been featured on bestseller lists, adapted for the cinema, shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize, selected as winner or finalist of twenty awards, and translated into thirty-five languages.

  Born in Lahore, he has spent about half his life there and much of the rest in London, New York, and California.

  Awards & recognitions given to Mohsin Hamid:

  2014

  Haus der Kulturen der Welt International Literature Award (shortlist): How to Get Filthy Rich in Rising Asia

  KLF Embassy of France Prize (shortlist): How to Get Filthy Rich in Rising Asia

  Tiziano Terzani International Literary Prize (winner): How to Get Filthy Rich in Rising Asia

  2013

  DSC Prize for South Asian Literature (shortlist): How to Get Filthy Rich in Rising Asia

  Foreign Policy's 100 Leading Global Thinkers

  2009

  Guardian's Books of the Decade: The Reluctant Fundamentalist

  International IMPAC Dublin Literary Award (shortlist): The Reluctant Fundamentalist

  Premio Speciale Dal Testo Allo Schermo (winner): The Reluctant Fundamentalist

  2008

  Ambassador Book Award (winner): The Reluctant Fundamentalist

  Anisfield-Wolf Book Award (winner): The Reluctant Fundamentalist

  Arts Council England Decibel Award (shortlist): The Reluctant Fundamentalist

  Asian American Literary Award (winner): The Reluctant Fundamentalist

  Australia-Asia Literary Award (shortlist): The Reluctant Fundamentalist

  Commonwealth Writers Prize for Best Book (shortlist): The Reluctant Fundamentalist

  Index on Censorship T R Fyvel Award (shortlist): The Reluctant Fundamentalist

  James Tait Black Memorial Prize (shortlist): The Reluctant Fundamentalist

  South Bank Show Award for Literature (winner): The Reluctant Fundamentalist

  2007

  Good Housekeeping Book Award for Most Compelling Read (winner): The Reluctant Fundamentalist

  Man Booker Prize (shortlist): The Reluctant Fundamentalist

  2001

  Betty Trask Award (winner): Moth Smoke

  Commonwealth Writers Prize for Best First Book (shortlist): Moth Smoke

  PEN/Hemingway Award (shortlist): Moth Smoke

  2017

  "Yes I'm pro-migrant. I personally tend to believe that there is a right to migration in the same way that there's a right to love whom you like, to believe what you believe, and to say what you want to say." NPR Morning Edition interview on Exit West, migration, fear, the political similarities between Pakistan and America, and the importance of democratic activism (audio)

  2016

  "Part of the great political crisis we face in the world today is a failure to imagine plausible desirable futures. We are surrounded by nostalgic visions, violently nostalgic visions. Fiction can imagine differently.... We certainly need it now. Because if we can’t imagine desirable futures for ourselves that stand a chance of actually coming to pass, our collective depression could well condemn humanity to a period of terrible savagery." New Yorker interview on Exit West

  "I understand that people are afraid of migrants. If you're in a wealthy country, it's understandable that you might fear the arrival of lots of people from far away. But that fear is like racism: it's understandable, but it needs to be countered, diminished, resisted. People are going to move in vast numbers in the coming decades and centuries. Sea levels will rise, weather patterns will change, and billions will move. We need to figure out how to build a vision for this coming reality that isn't a disaster, that is humane and even inspiring." Lit Hub interview on Exit West

  2015

  "One day the human beings of planet Earth will look back at our era and think of us, those who claim to love freedom but who live in societies that legalize migrant detention and deportation, with the same puzzlement that we think of those who lived in societies that legalized slavery." New York Times interview on reading the New York Times

  2013

  "I don't believe in 'reality' as such. What we call 'real' is something our minds create. So the whole notion of 'realism' is an interesting one. In my novels, I have tended to build seemingly 'realistic' narratives inside 'unreal' frames." Los Angeles Review of Books interview on first three novels

  "The beautiful thing about writing is that it's a global community and on your bookshelf are all the teachers you could possibly want." BBC Talking Books interview on first three novels (audio)

  "In a weird way, Lahore is a big river city like the various American cities that have to do with the Mississippi. Blues territory, in other words. The blues is pitched with the emotions and resonance and feeling of a lot of Punjabi folk music, which is what I grew up with." New York Times interview on current interests

  "The Sufi poem, sort of Sufism in a nutshell, is Islamic mysticism where love is used as the prism for relating to the universe. And it generally expresses itself in the form of love poems, which are second-person addresses, very often, and quite often nameless second-person addresses." Los Angeles Times interview on How to Get Filthy Rich in Rising Asia

  "For so long we've talked about 'the city' and we've used cities like New York or London as our template for our universal conversation about cities, and I was thinking, 'Well, maybe Lahore actually is quite typical of cities around the world now. Maybe I can use Lahore as a template for this global city.' And that's what I've tried to do." NPR Fresh Air interview with Terry Gross on How to Get Filthy Rich in Rising Asia (audio, and also transcript)

  "It's poetry's respect for economy that I'm after... but without abandoning fiction's love for storytelling." Time Out Chicago interview on How to Get Filthy Rich in Rising Asia

  "There's a material improvement that is going on. And I think it can't be denied. The problem, though, is something else. I think the problem is more psychological or almost spiritual, you could say. There's a kind of spiritual and mental health crisis that's taking place." NPR Morning Edition interview with Steve Inskeep on How to Get Filthy Rich in Rising Aisa (audio, and also trancript)

  "I take six or seven years to write really small books. There is a kind of aesthetic of leanness, of brevity." NPR Morning Edition essay by Steve Inskeep on How to Get Filthy Rich in Rising Aisa

  "I feel as a human being I can perceive humanly about things without being overly constrained about the notion of there being a 'West' and an 'East.'" The Atlantic interview on How to Get Filthy Rich in Rising Asia

  "I think the self-help book form fits with the 'you' naturally. The oldest self-help book forms, which are religious self-help book forms, often employ it. So whether you look at a direct address to the reader in sacred texts, or you look at Sufi poetry... it makes you aware of the relationship between reader and writer." Wall Street Journal interview on How to Get Filthy Rich in Rising Asia

  "Life isn’t just about the minimisation of risk... I still prefer it here because these are the people I want to spend my life with." New Zealand Listener interview on How to Get Filthy Rich in Risin Asia

  "In today's world, where people are watching TV, they are on Twitter, and they are absorbing lots of different types of things, we need new kinds of novels. That's what I'm trying to do." Asia Society interview on How to Get Filthy Rich in Rising Asia

  "I couldn't shake this notion that novels are often offered to readers as a form of self-help, that literary novels are read sometimes, or at least marketed, as if to say: 'if you read this it'll be good for you.'" Granta interview on How to Get Filthy Rich in Rising Asia (audio)

  2012

  "It can be either very close and very near, or you can zoom back to a cosmic, almost religious text." NY Daily News article on speaking to Jay McInerney about How to Get Filthy Rich in Rising Asia

  "Not having any names in the novel, except for continent names, was a way for me to de-exoticize the context, to see it fresh." New Yorker interview on How to Get Filthy Rich in Rising Asia

  "What is not okay is that out of that fear, you say something you do not believe in." Express Tribune article on a talk for university students in Lahore

  2011

  "I spend a long time on books because I'm trying to figure out how to write them as I go along." BBC Radio 4 Book Club program on The Reluctant Fundamentalist (audio)

  "What shocks me about America, about the way America is headed, is that in some ways it's becoming increasingly Pakistan-like." Radio Open Source interview with Christopher Lydon on a Pakistan-like trend in America (audio)

  2010

  "I was in Bombay and I had to spend the morning at the police station and the evening hours on national television." NPR Morning Edition interview on advocating peace between Pakistan and India (audio)

  2009

  "It may just be that I'm a seven-year novelist." BBC World Book Club program on The Reluctant Fundamentalist (audio)

  2007

  "Many people have said it feels like a thriller. The reason for that is we are already afraid." Booker Prize Foundation interview on The Reluctant Fundamentalist

  "I read a lot as a kid, everything from children's books, Charlotte's Web and The Wind in the Willows, to, as I got older, reading swords and sorcery." Barnes & Noble Studio interview on life, influences, and The Reluctant Fundamentalist (video)

  "As someone who is naturally split between two cultures, the fact that the cultures are becoming so increasingly hostile to each other makes me much more unsettled within myself." NPR Fresh Air interview with Terry Gross on The Reluctant Fundamentalist (audio)

  "I believe that the core skill of a novelist is empathy: the ability to imagine what someone else might feel. And I believe that the world is suffering from a deficit of empathy at the moment." Harcourt interview on The Reluctant Fundamentalist

  "I write my first few drafts from scratch every time, incorporating elements from memory, and drafts can be so different as to be almost different novels." Hamish Hamilton interview on The Reluctant Fundamentalist

  2001

  "I'll work on a study for three or four months, finish it and then go back to Pakistan and write." New York Observer profile on Moth Smoke and working at McKinsey

  2000

  "The book explores the idea of how you arrive at truth with conflicting narratives, which is what you do in law." Harvard Law Bulletin profile on Moth Smoke and law school

  "I didn't like being programmed for a profession." Globe and Mail profile on Moth Smoke, college, law school, and McKinsey

• Wikipedia -

  Mohsin Hamid
  From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
  Mohsin Hamid
  محسن حامد
  Mohsin Hamid reading, Brooklyn.jpg
  Born 1971 (age 45–46)
  Lahore, Pakistan
  Occupation Novelist
  Nationality Pakistan
  United Kingdom
  Alma mater Princeton University
  Harvard Law School
  Period 2000–present
  Genre Literary fiction

  Mohsin Hamid's voice
  Menu
  0:00
  from the BBC programme Front Row, 24 April 2013[1]
  Website
  www.mohsinhamid.com

  Mohsin Hamid (Urdu: محسن حامد‎; born 1971) is a British Pakistani novelist, writer and brand consultant. His novels are Moth Smoke (2000), The Reluctant Fundamentalist (2007), How to Get Filthy Rich in Rising Asia (2013), and Exit West (2017).

  Contents

  1 Early life and education
  2 Work
  3 Personal life
  4 List of works
  5 Honours
  6 References
  7 Further references
  8 External links

  Early life and education

  Hamid spent part of his childhood in the United States, where he stayed from the age of 3 to 9 while his father, a university professor, was enrolled in a PhD program at Stanford University. He then moved with his family back to Lahore, Pakistan, and attended the Lahore American School.[2]

  At the age of 18, Hamid returned to the United States to continue his education. He graduated from Princeton University summa cum laude in 1993, having studied under the writers Joyce Carol Oates and Toni Morrison. Hamid wrote the first draft of his first novel for a fiction workshop taught by Morrison. He returned to Pakistan after college to continue working on it.[3]

  Hamid then attended Harvard Law School, graduating in 1997.[4] Finding corporate law boring, he repaid his student loans by working for several years as a management consultant at McKinsey & Company in New York City. He was allowed to take three months off each year to write, and he used this time to complete his first novel Moth Smoke.[5]
  Work

  Hamid moved to London in the summer of 2001, initially intending to stay only one year. Although he frequently returned to Pakistan to write, he continued to live in London for eight years, becoming a dual citizen of the United Kingdom in 2006.[6] In 2004 he joined the brand consultancy Wolff Olins, working only three days a week so as to retain time to write. [7] He later served as managing director of Wolff Olins' London office, and in 2015 was appointed the firm's first-ever Chief Storytelling Officer.[8]

  Hamid's first novel, Moth Smoke, told the story of a marijuana-smoking ex-banker in post-nuclear-test Lahore who falls in love with his best friend's wife and becomes a heroin addict. It was published in 2000, and quickly became a cult hit in Pakistan and India. It was also a finalist for the PEN/Hemingway Award given to the best first novel in the US, and was adapted for television in Pakistan and as an operetta in Italy.[9]

  Moth Smoke had an innovative structure, using multiple voices, second person trial scenes, and essays on such topics as the role of air-conditioning in the lives of its main characters. Pioneering a hip, contemporary approach to South Asian fiction, it was considered by some critics to be "the most interesting novel that came out of [its] generation of subcontinent writing."[10] In the New York Review of Books, Anita Desai noted:

  One could not really continue to write, or read about, the slow seasonal changes, the rural backwaters, gossipy courtyards, and traditional families in a world taken over by gun-running, drug-trafficking, large-scale industrialism, commercial entrepreneurship, tourism, new money, nightclubs, boutiques... Where was the Huxley, the Orwell, the Scott Fitzgerald, or even the Tom Wolfe, Jay McInerney, or Brett Easton Ellis to record this new world? Mohsin Hamid's novel Moth Smoke, set in Lahore, is one of the first pictures we have of that world.[11]

  His second novel, The Reluctant Fundamentalist, told the story of a Pakistani man who decides to leave his high-flying life in America after a failed love affair and the terrorist attacks of 9/11. It was published in 2007 and became a million-copy international best seller, reaching No.4 on the New York Times Best Seller list.[12][13] The novel was shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize, won several awards including the Anisfield-Wolf Book Award and the Asian American Literary Award, and was translated into over 25 languages. The Guardian selected it as one of the books that defined the decade.[14]

  Like Moth Smoke, The Reluctant Fundamentalist was formally experimental. The novel used the unusual device of a dramatic monologue in which the Pakistani protagonist continually addresses an American listener who is never heard from directly. (Hamid has said The Fall by Albert Camus served as his model.[15][16]) According to one commentator, because of this technique:

  maybe we the readers are the ones who jump to conclusions; maybe the book is intended as a Rorschach to reflect back our unconscious assumptions. In our not knowing lies the novel's suspense... Hamid literally leaves us at the end in a kind of alley, the story suddenly suspended; it's even possible that some act of violence might occur. But more likely, we are left holding the bag of conflicting worldviews. We're left to ponder the symbolism of Changez having been caught up in the game of symbolism—a game we ourselves have been known to play.[17]

  In an interview in May 2007, Hamid said of the brevity of The Reluctant Fundamentalist: "I’d rather people read my book twice than only half-way through."[18]

  His third novel, How to Get Filthy Rich in Rising Asia, was excerpted by The New Yorker in their 24 September 2012 issue and by Granta in their Spring 2013 issue, and was released in March 2013 by Riverhead Books.[19][20] As with his previous books, How to Get Filthy Rich in Rising Asia bends conventions of both genre and form. Narrated in the second person, it tells the story of the protagonist's ("your") journey from impoverished rural boy to tycoon in an unnamed contemporary city in "rising Asia," and of his pursuit of the nameless "pretty girl" whose path continually crosses but never quite converges with his. Stealing its shape from the self-help books devoured by ambitious youths all over "rising Asia," the novel is playful but also quite profound in its portrayal of the thirst for ambition and love in a time of shattering economic and social upheaval. In her New York Times review of the novel, Michiko Kakutani called it "deeply moving," writing that How to Get Filthy Rich in Rising Asia "reaffirms [Hamid's] place as one of his generation's most inventive and gifted writers."[21]

  Hamid has also written on politics, art, literature, travel, and other topics, most recently on Pakistan's internal division and extremism in an op-ed for the New York Times.[22] His journalism, essays, and stories have appeared in TIME, The Guardian, Dawn,[23] The New York Times, The Washington Post,[24] The International Herald Tribune,[25] the Paris Review, and other publications. In 2013 he was named one of the world's 100 Leading Global Thinkers by Foreign Policy magazine.

  Hamid's most recent novel, Exit West, is about a young couple, Nadia and Saeed, and their relationship in a time where the world is taken by storm by migrants.
  Personal life

  Hamid moved to Lahore in 2009 with his wife Zahra and their daughter Dina. He now divides his time between Pakistan and abroad, living between Lahore, New York, London, and Mediterranean countries including Italy and Greece. Hamid has described himself as a "mongrel"[26] and has said of his own writing that "a novel can often be a divided man’s conversation with himself."[27]
  List of works

  Moth Smoke (2000) ISBN 0-374-21354-2
  The Reluctant Fundamentalist (2007) ISBN 0-241-14365-9
  How to Get Filthy Rich in Rising Asia (2013) ISBN 978-1-59448-729-3
  Discontent and Its Civilisations: Despatches from Lahore, New York & London (2014) ISBN 978-0-241-14630-9
  Exit West (2017) ISBN 978-0-241-97907-5

  Honours

  2000 New York Times Notable Book of the Year: Moth Smoke
  2001 Betty Trask Award: Moth Smoke
  2001 Hemingway Foundation/PEN Award (shortlist): Moth Smoke
  2007 Man Booker Prize for Fiction (shortlist): The Reluctant Fundamentalist
  2007 New York Times Notable Book of the Year: The Reluctant Fundamentalist
  2008 Ambassador Book Award of the English Speaking Union: The Reluctant Fundamentalist
  2008 Anisfield-Wolf Book Award:[28] The Reluctant Fundamentalist
  2008 Arts Council England Decibel Award (shortlist): The Reluctant Fundamentalist
  2008 Asian American Literary Award: The Reluctant Fundamentalist
  2008 Australia-Asia Literary Award (shortlist): The Reluctant Fundamentalist
  2008 Commonwealth Writers Prize (Eurasia Region, Best Book) (shortlist): The Reluctant Fundamentalist
  2008 Index on Censorship T R Fyvel Award (shortlist): The Reluctant Fundamentalist
  2008 James Tait Black Memorial Prize (for fiction) (shortlist): The Reluctant Fundamentalist
  2008 South Bank Show Annual Award for Literature: The Reluctant Fundamentalist
  2009 International IMPAC Dublin Literary Award (shortlist): The Reluctant Fundamentalist
  2009 Premio Speciale Dal Testo Allo Schermo: The Reluctant Fundamentalist
  2013 DSC Prize for South Asian Literature (shortlist): How to Get Filthy Rich in Rising Asia[29]
  2013 Foreign Policy magazine's 100 Leading Global Thinkers[30]
  2014 Tiziano Terzani International Literary Prize: How to Get Filthy Rich in Rising Asia[31]
  2014 International Literature Award (shortlist): How to Get Filthy Rich in Rising Asia[32]

  Source: British Council website[33]

• Amazon -

  Mohsin Hamid is the author of three novels, MOTH SMOKE, THE RELUCTANT FUNDAMENTALIST, and HOW TO GET FILTHY RICH IN RISING ASIA, and a book of essays, DISCONTENT AND ITS CIVILIZATIONS.

  His writing has been featured on bestseller lists, adapted for the cinema, shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize, selected as winner or finalist of twenty awards, and translated into more than thirty languages.

  He was born in Lahore, Pakistan, and has spent about half his life there and much of the rest in London, New York, and California.

Exit West
Lauren Bufferd
(Mar. 2017): p19.
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2017 BookPage
http://bookpage.com/

EXIT WEST

By Mohsin Hamid

Riverhead

$26, 240 pages

ISNB9780735212176

Audio, eBook available

WORLD FICTION

The novels of Mohsin Hamid (How to Get Filthy Rich in Rising Asia) range from conventionally structured stories to fiction disguised as self-help manuals. In his fourth novel, Exit West, Hamid explores the worldwide refugee crisis using simple, almost allegorical language spiced with an unexpected dose of speculative fiction. The novel follows a young couple who join a wave of migrants as their city collapses into violence. But in Hamid's imagined world, there are doorways that lead from one city to another and allow people (mostly dark skinned) to emerge magically in other countries (mostly Western), much to the consternation of the (mostly light skinned) resident population.

Like all of Hamid's novels, Exit West is a love story, but one that exists within the structure of a moral thriller. Bold and curious Nadia meets the quieter, more restrained Saeed in night class while the unnamed country where they reside teeters on the brink of a civil war. Their attraction is immediate, and their path to intimacy is made more intoxicating by the dangers around them. At first, their relationship is like many other young couples'; they listen to music, sit in cafes and smoke a little weed. But when Saeed's mother is hit by a stray bullet, the couple decides to move in together. They also begin to heed the rumors about doors that serve as portals from one country to another. Making the ultimate decision to leave their homeland, and paying a middleman a hefty sum, Saeed and Nadia are led to a door that takes them to a refugee camp on a Greek Island. Later doors lead to a private room in an abandoned mansion outside London and then a windswept coast in Marin County, California. Each move tests the couple's stamina and courage, and although they are dependent on one another for survival, the ties that bind them grow weaker with every transition.

Exit West is political without being didactic and romantic without being maudlin. The storytelling is stripped down to essentials; though the novel is epic in scope and geography, it is only 240 pages. Hamid masterfully handles the shifts from the symbolic to the real, the unnamed to the specific. Exit West is a richly imaginative work with a firm grip on what is happening to someone somewhere right this minute.
Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
Bufferd, Lauren. "Exit West." BookPage, Mar. 2017, p. 19+. General OneFile, go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?p=ITOF&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&id=GALE%7CA483701840&it=r&asid=4c8da4fc98177612e35d45bff117e45b. Accessed 24 May 2017.

Gale Document Number: GALE|A483701840
Hamid, Mohsin. Exit West
Terry Hong
142.2 (Feb. 1, 2017): p70.
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2017 Library Journals, LLC. A wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
http://www.libraryjournal.com/

* Hamid, Mohsin. Exit West. Riverhead. Mar. 2017. 240p. ISBN 9780735212176. $26; ebk. ISBN 9780735212183. F

"We are all migrants through time," observes Man Booker Prize short-lister Hamid (The Reluctant Fundamentalist). The impulses driving such a movement, especially when rooted in violent conflict, is at the core of Hamid's exceptional fourth novel. In an unnamed city (not unlike the author's native Lahore, Pakistan), Saeed and Nadia meet, find love, and expect to share a future, but a militant takeover forces them to flee their homeland. Hamid reveals their tenuous journey from a dreamlike distance that perfectly blends reality with fablelike parable. For example, escape happens through "doors" only accessible via the right contact at the right price. While focusing the narrative spotlight on his lovers-on-the-run, Hamid regularly interrupts the couple's peregrinations with snapshot interludes--a potential murder in Tokyo, a woman threatened in Vienna, an aging grandmother in Palo Alto--that serve as reminders that life (and death) continues for everyone else, everywhere else, every which way. Both mellifluous and jarring, this novel is a profound meditation on the unpredictable temporality of human existence and the immeasurable cost of widespread enmity. VERDICT Libraries would do well to acquire this and all of Hamid's extraordinary titles. [See Prepub Alert, 9/12/16.]--Terry Hong, Smithsonian BookDragon, Washington, DC
Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
Hong, Terry. "Hamid, Mohsin. Exit West." Library Journal, 1 Feb. 2017, p. 70. General OneFile, go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?p=ITOF&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&id=GALE%7CA479301198&it=r&asid=a557539b955701845102463406024c51. Accessed 24 May 2017.

Gale Document Number: GALE|A479301198
Exit West
264.1 (Jan. 2, 2017): p33.
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2017 PWxyz, LLC
http://www.publishersweekly.com/

Exit West

Mohsin Hamid. Riverhead, $26 (240p)

ISBN 978-0-73521-217-6

Hamid's (The Reluctant Fundamentalist, How to Get Filthy Rich in Rising Asia) trim yet poignant fourth novel addresses similar themes as his previous work and presents a unique perspective on the global refugee crisis. In an unidentified country, young Saeed and burqa-wearing Nadia flee their home after Saeed's mother is killed by a stray bullet and their city turns increasingly dangerous due to worsening violent clashes between the government and guerillas. The couple joins other migrants traveling to safer havens via carefully guarded doors. Through one door, they wind up in a crowded camp on the Greek Island of Mykonos. Through another, they secure a private room in an abandoned London mansion populated mostly by displaced Nigerians. A third door takes them to California's Marin County. In each location, their relationship is by turns strengthened and tested by their struggle to find food, adequate shelter, and a sense of belonging among emigrant communities. Hamid's storytelling is stripped down, and the book's sweeping allegory is timely and resonant. Of particular importance is the contrast between the migrants' tenuous daily reality and that of the privileged second- or third-generation native population who'd prefer their new alien neighbors to simply disappear. Agent: Jay Mandel, WME Entertainment. (Mar.)
Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
"Exit West." Publishers Weekly, 2 Jan. 2017, p. 33. General OneFile, go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?p=ITOF&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&id=GALE%7CA478696462&it=r&asid=585a6ad0b583ff574db986f407462918. Accessed 24 May 2017.

Gale Document Number: GALE|A478696462
Hamid, Mohsin: EXIT WEST
(Dec. 15, 2016):
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2016 Kirkus Media LLC
http://www.kirkusreviews.com/

Hamid, Mohsin EXIT WEST Riverhead (Adult Fiction) $26.00 3, 7 ISBN: 978-0-73521-217-6

Hamid (Discontent and Its Civilizations, 2014, etc.) crafts a richly imaginative tale of love and loss in the ashes of civil war. The country--well, it doesn't much matter, one of any number that are riven by sectarian violence, by militias and fundamentalists and repressive government troops. It's a place where a ponytailed spice merchant might vanish only to be found headless, decapitated "nape-first with a serrated knife to enhance discomfort." Against this background, Nadia and Saeed don't stand much of a chance; she wears a burka but only "so men don't fuck with me," but otherwise the two young lovers don't do a lot to try to blend in, spending their days ingesting "shrooms" and smoking a little ganga to get away from the explosions and screams, listening to records that the militants have forbidden, trying to be as unnoticeable as possible, Saeed crouching in terror at the "flying robots high above in the darkening sky." Fortunately, there's a way out: some portal, both literal and fantastic, that the militants haven't yet discovered and that, for a price, leads outside the embattled city to the West. "When we migrate," writes Hamid, "we murder from our lives those we leave behind." True, and Saeed and Nadia murder a bit of themselves in fleeing, too, making new homes in London and then San Francisco while shed of their old, innocent selves and now locked in descending unhappiness, sharing a bed without touching, just two among countless nameless and faceless refugees in an uncaring new world. Saeed and Nadia understand what would happen if millions of people suddenly turned up in their country, fleeing a war far away. That doesn't really make things better, though. Unable to protect each other, fearful but resolute, their lives turn in unexpected ways in this new world. One of the most bittersweet love stories in modern memory and a book to savor even while despairing of its truths.
Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
"Hamid, Mohsin: EXIT WEST." Kirkus Reviews, 15 Dec. 2016. General OneFile, go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?p=ITOF&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&id=GALE%7CA473652421&it=r&asid=a93083fc401651c2f91883cb739cf025. Accessed 24 May 2017.

Gale Document Number: GALE|A473652421
Book World: 'Exit West,' by Mohsin Hamid, is a tale of love in the time of migration
William Giraldi
(Feb. 23, 2017): News:
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2017 The Washington Post
http://www.washingtonpost.com/

Byline: William Giraldi

Exit West

By Mohsin Hamid

Riverhead. 226 pp. $26

---

Novels are, or should be, written in defiance of the now, in an imaginative sedition against an overweening present. For the bold novelist, "the way we live now" is rarely as fertile as the way we don't. The realist can too often be kin to the journalist, content with obedient representation, staid reportage. But the fabulist, striving for the extraordinary, can be kin to the psalmist, the satirist, the seer.

The Pakistani-born Mohsin Hamid's fourth novel, "Exit West," takes the current Middle Eastern migrant crisis and injects a wizardry, an allegorical urgency, that declares this book's intention to be art. In an unnamed city about to be wrecked by war - you will think Mosul or Aleppo - two students, Nadia and Saeed, begin a romance. With its decisive rhythm, its faint suggestion of mythos, the first line sets the pitch of this novel: "In a city swollen by refugees but still mostly at peace, or at least not yet openly at war, a young man met a young woman in a classroom and did not speak to her."

Soon there are killings, curfews, battles at the periphery, the privations and asphyxiations of life under militant rule. Soon there are rumors, too, of otherworldly doors that can deliver you elsewhere, to possible havens in Europe or America. Like all doors, these doors have their keepers; like all keepers, these keepers have their price. They will smuggle you to the rooms that contain the doors: Blake's doors of perception in that they are doors of deliverance, makeshift wormholes, conduits that are "both like dying and like being born." Birth and death do not work backward, not even in Hamid's traumatized fantasia. Nadia and Saeed escape knowing they will not return. Refugees are pilgrims in reverse. Home becomes a haunt in the recurrent murk of dreams.

The novel's Marquezian title might have been "Love in the Time of Migration," though this magical love story is, like most love stories told in full, a loss-of-love story - love abraded by the pitiless stipulations of living. As they arrive on the Greek isle of Mykonos, and then in London and finally in Marin, Calif., Nadia and Saeed must contend with the myriad hazards posed both by natives and other refugees, the opposition out to con or kill them, or return them to a homeland strafed into moonscape. They must contend, too, with a fanged grief for what they have lost and with Saeed's dauntless religious faith when it rubs against Nadia's reason. For Nadia - with an itch in her heart, with a mind better tuned to the nervous vicissitudes of their new motion - love in the time of migration is a love with more behind than ahead.

Hamid has been much laureled for the lucent beauty of his prose. The sentences of "Exit West" are persuasively stressed with a fairy-tale frankness and its sinister undertow. If his ear betrays him with "impending ending" and "insulating glazing," it rewards him with "labyrinthine gloom" and "seaside villages gasping beneath tidal surges." If he is too frequently fond of the dead pair - "free spirits," "hushed tones," "vast majority" - he is also fully in command of the conquering image: "She had shuffled off the weight of her virginity with some perplexity but not excessive fuss," or: "Their phones rested screens-down between them, like the weapons of desperadoes at a parley." Writers should be wise, and Hamid is wiser than many - an unobtrusive wisdom born in wry counterpoint to ruin: "The end of the world can be cozy at times," or: "Alone a person is almost nothing."

In these pages you will find no indictment of the scurvy factors that created the wars and displacement of millions, nor will you find a secularist's contempt for Saeed's exhausted religiosity. Nadia's unbelief, her indifference to prayer, her self-protective donning of a black robe: They exist not in modish irony but in hushed earnestness. Hamid understands that the novelist is no pamphleteer, no bitter soap-boxer. Writers of imaginative prose have a responsibility only to their own story, to whatever beauty and wisdom that story demands, and to the moral pulsing manifest in their sensibility, their style. When Hamid writes that "people are monkeys who have forgotten that they are monkeys," he is not assenting to an easeful nihilism or to humankind's bestial cravings, but rather offering the necessary reminder that people "have lost respect for what they are born of." Lose respect - lose mercy - for what we are born of, for the natural world and our commonality within it, and we become partner to the most degenerate deeds.

No novel is really about the cliche called "the human condition," but good novels expose and interpret the particular condition of the humans in their charge, and this is what Hamid has achieved here. If in its physical and perilous immediacy Nadia and Saeed's condition is alien to the mass of us, "Exit West" makes a final, certain declaration of affinity: "We are all migrants through time."

---

Giraldi is the author, most recently, of "The Hero's Body: A Memoir."
Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
Giraldi, William. "Book World: 'Exit West,' by Mohsin Hamid, is a tale of love in the time of migration." Washington Post, 23 Feb. 2017. General OneFile, go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?p=ITOF&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&id=GALE%7CA482220684&it=r&asid=0053e7cdbf552d040341b2a830e802cf. Accessed 24 May 2017.

Gale Document Number: GALE|A482220684
'Exit West,' by Mohsin Hamid, is a tale of love in the time of migration
William Giraldi
(Feb. 16, 2017):
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2017 The Washington Post

Byline: William Giraldi

Novels are, or should be, written in defiance of the now, in an imaginative sedition against an overweening present. For the bold novelist, "the way we live now" is rarely as fertile as the way we don't. The realist can too often be kin to the journalist, content with obedient representation, staid reportage. But the fabulist, striving for the extraordinary, can be kin to the psalmist, the satirist, the seer.

The Pakistani-born Mohsin Hamid's fourth novel, "Exit West," takes the current Middle Eastern migrant crisis and injects a wizardry, an allegorical urgency, that declares this book's intention to be art. In an unnamed city about to be wrecked by war -- you will think Mosul or Aleppo -- two students, Nadia and Saeed, begin a romance. With its decisive rhythm, its faint suggestion of mythos, the first line sets the pitch of this novel: "In a city swollen by refugees but still mostly at peace, or at least not yet openly at war, a young man met a young woman in a classroom and did not speak to her."

Soon there are killings, curfews, battles at the periphery, the privations and asphyxiations of life under militant rule. Soon there are rumors, too, of otherworldly doors that can deliver you elsewhere, to possible havens in Europe or America. Like all doors, these doors have their keepers; like all keepers, these keepers have their price. They will smuggle you to the rooms that contain the doors: Blake's doors of perception in that they are doors of deliverance, makeshift wormholes, conduits that are "both like dying and like being born." Birth and death do not work backward, not even in Hamid's traumatized fantasia. Nadia and Saeed escape knowing they will not return. Refugees are pilgrims in reverse. Home becomes a haunt in the recurrent murk of dreams.

The novel's Marquezian title might have been "Love in the Time of Migration," though this magical love story is, like most love stories told in full, a loss-of-love story -- love abraded by the pitiless stipulations of living. As they arrive on the Greek isle of Mykonos, and then in London and finally in Marin, Calif., Nadia and Saeed must contend with the myriad hazards posed both by natives and other refugees, the opposition out to con or kill them, or return them to a homeland strafed into moonscape. They must contend, too, with a fanged grief for what they have lost and with Saeed's dauntless religious faith when it rubs against Nadia's reason. For Nadia -- with an itch in her heart, with a mind better tuned to the nervous vicissitudes of their new motion -- love in the time of migration is a love with more behind than ahead.

Hamid has been much laureled for the lucent beauty of his prose. The sentences of "Exit West" are persuasively stressed with a fairy-tale frankness and its sinister undertow. If his ear betrays him with "impending ending" and "insulating glazing," it rewards him with "labyrinthine gloom" and "seaside villages gasping beneath tidal surges." If he is too frequently fond of the dead pair -- "free spirits," "hushed tones," "vast majority" -- he is also fully in command of the conquering image: "She had shuffled off the weight of her virginity with some perplexity but not excessive fuss," or: "Their phones rested screens-down between them, like the weapons of desperadoes at a parley." Writers should be wise, and Hamid is wiser than many -- an unobtrusive wisdom born in wry counterpoint to ruin: "The end of the world can be cozy at times," or: "Alone a person is almost nothing."

In these pages you will find no indictment of the scurvy factors that created the wars and displacement of millions, nor will you find a secularist's contempt for Saeed's exhausted religiosity. Nadia's unbelief, her indifference to prayer, her self-protective donning of a black robe: They exist not in modish irony but in hushed earnestness. Hamid understands that the novelist is no pamphleteer, no bitter soapboxer. Writers of imaginative prose have a responsibility only to their own story, to whatever beauty and wisdom that story demands, and to the moral pulsing manifest in their sensibility, their style. When Hamid writes that "people are monkeys who have forgotten that they are monkeys," he is not assenting to an easeful nihilism or to humankind's bestial cravings, but rather offering the necessary reminder that people "have lost respect for what they are born of." Lose respect -- lose mercy -- for what we are born of, for the natural world and our commonality within it, and we become partner to the most degenerate deeds.

No novel is really about the cliche called "the human condition," but good novels expose and interpret the particular condition of the humans in their charge, and this is what Hamid has achieved here. If in its physical and perilous immediacy Nadia and Saeed's condition is alien to the mass of us, "Exit West" makes a final, certain declaration of affinity: "We are all migrants through time."

William Giraldi is the author, most recently, of "The Hero's Body: A Memoir."

On Friday, March 10 at 7 p.m., Mohsin Hamid will be at Politics and Prose Bookstore, 5015 Connecticut Ave. NW.
Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
Giraldi, William. "'Exit West,' by Mohsin Hamid, is a tale of love in the time of migration." Washingtonpost.com, 16 Feb. 2017. General OneFile, go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?p=ITOF&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&id=GALE%7CA482361688&it=r&asid=329ac22b152659ab3f2dff73f733cd22. Accessed 24 May 2017.

Gale Document Number: GALE|A482361688

Bufferd, Lauren. "Exit West." BookPage, Mar. 2017, p. 19+. General OneFile, go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?p=ITOF&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&it=r&id=GALE%7CA483701840&asid=4c8da4fc98177612e35d45bff117e45b. Accessed 24 May 2017. Hong, Terry. "Hamid, Mohsin. Exit West." Library Journal, 1 Feb. 2017, p. 70. General OneFile, go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?p=ITOF&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&it=r&id=GALE%7CA479301198&asid=a557539b955701845102463406024c51. Accessed 24 May 2017. "Exit West." Publishers Weekly, 2 Jan. 2017, p. 33. General OneFile, go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?p=ITOF&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&it=r&id=GALE%7CA478696462&asid=585a6ad0b583ff574db986f407462918. Accessed 24 May 2017. "Hamid, Mohsin: EXIT WEST." Kirkus Reviews, 15 Dec. 2016. General OneFile, go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?p=ITOF&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&it=r&id=GALE%7CA473652421&asid=a93083fc401651c2f91883cb739cf025. Accessed 24 May 2017. Giraldi, William. "Book World: 'Exit West,' by Mohsin Hamid, is a tale of love in the time of migration." Washington Post, 23 Feb. 2017. General OneFile, go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?p=ITOF&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&it=r&id=GALE%7CA482220684&asid=0053e7cdbf552d040341b2a830e802cf. Accessed 24 May 2017. Giraldi, William. "'Exit West,' by Mohsin Hamid, is a tale of love in the time of migration." Washingtonpost.com, 16 Feb. 2017. General OneFile, go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?p=ITOF&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&it=r&id=GALE%7CA482361688&asid=329ac22b152659ab3f2dff73f733cd22. Accessed 24 May 2017.

• New York Times Book Review
  https://www.nytimes.com/2017/02/27/books/review-exit-west-mohsin-hamid.html
  Word count: 1285

  Review: In ‘Exit West,’ Mohsin Hamid Mixes Global Trouble With a Bit of Magic

  Books of The Times

  By MICHIKO KAKUTANI FEB. 27, 2017
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  Credit Patricia Wall/The New York Times

  EXIT WEST
  By Mohsin Hamid
  231 pages. Riverhead Books. $26.

  Mohsin Hamid’s dynamic yet lapidary books have all explored the convulsive changes overtaking the world, as tradition and modernity clash headlong, and as refugees — fleeing war or poverty or hopelessness — try to make their way to safer ground. His compelling new novel, “Exit West,” is no exception, recounting the story of the migrants Saeed and Nadia, who leave an unnamed country in the midst of a civil war and journey to Greece, England and eventually the United States in an effort to invent new lives for themselves.

  The first half of their story is about how war warps everyday life; the second half, a tale of globalization and its discontents. Writing in spare, crystalline prose, Hamid conveys the experience of living in a city under siege with sharp, stabbing immediacy. He shows just how swiftly ordinary life — with all its banal rituals and routines — can morph into the defensive crouch of life in a war zone, with fears of truck bombs and sniper fire and armed soldiers at checkpoints becoming a daily reality, along with constant surveillance from drones and helicopters. He also captures how insidiously violence alters the calculus of daily life: how windows with beautiful views become a liability; how funerals become smaller, more rushed affairs because of fighting in the streets.

  The fiercely independent Nadia is feverishly keen to find a way out of the besieged city, and she and her more introspective boyfriend, Saeed, soon find an agent, who, for a fee, promises to supply them with an exit plan.

  There have been rumors of magical doors that whisk people away to strange and distant lands, and the door that Saeed and Nadia enter transports them to a beach on the Greek island of Mykonos, where hundreds of other migrants are living in tents and lean-tos in a makeshift refugee camp. Later, the couple will try other doorways that take them to other countries, other continents. “It was said in those days,” Hamid writes, “that the passage was both like dying and like being born.”
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  The device of a magical door is reminiscent of C. S. Lewis’s “The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe,” in which four children find a secret passageway, through a wardrobe in a spare room, to the mysterious realm of Narnia. There animals can talk, and good and evil openly battle. In summary, it might sound perversely counterintuitive of Hamid to use a fairy-tale-like device as a way to move his characters from their war-torn homeland to a new life in the West. How, the potential reader might ask, can the treacherous journeys undertaken by refugees — across seas or deserts; at the mercy of the sun, rain, cold, heat, hunger, thirst and unscrupulous smugglers; among other untold random terrors — be condensed into a simple step through a portal?
  Photo
  Mohsin Hamid Credit Jillian Edelstein

  Hamid, however, is less interested in the physical hardships faced by refugees in their crossings than in the psychology of exile and the haunting costs of loss and dislocation. Having left their families, their villages or their countries, many of the characters in his earlier novels, like “The Reluctant Fundamentalist” and “How to Get Filthy Rich in Rising Asia,” also felt like outsiders — yearning to escape the bounds of family or class or expectation, and yet at the same time homesick for some sense of roots and belonging. And in “Exit West,” Hamid does a harrowing job of conveying what it is like to leave behind family members, and what it means to leave home, which, however dangerous or oppressive it’s become, still represents everything that is familiar and known.

  For Saeed, prayer remains a way to connect with his dead mother and his beloved father, who refused to make the journey with him and Nadia. “He prayed fundamentally as a gesture of love for what had gone and would go and could be loved in no other way,” Hamid writes.

  Saeed thinks that prayer was “about being a man, being one of the men, a ritual that connected him to adulthood and to the notion of being a particular sort of man, a gentleman, a gentle man, a man who stood for community and faith and kindness and decency, a man, in other words, like his father.”
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  The shy, sweet Saeed is changed by the experience of exile. Regret about leaving his father behind, disillusion over being swindled by another migrant, bitterness over his new improvisatory existence — such emotions take their toll. Nadia is the more adaptive, adventurous one, but even her resilience changes the dynamic of their relationship, which begins to labor under the weight of their uncertain existence, their enforced closeness and dependency on each other, the worries of finding food and shelter, or work, every day.

  To open out his novel, Hamid intercuts the story of Nadia and Saeed with short, strobe-lit glimpses of other people’s stories around the world in a fashion that recalls a technique David Mitchell has employed in novels like “Ghostwritten.” It’s a technique that underscores the simultaneity of time and experience in our globalized world, reminding us of both the amazing similarities and vast differences among countries and individuals across an increasingly interconnected planet.

  By mixing the real and the surreal, and using old fairy-tale magic, Hamid has created a fictional universe that captures the global perils percolating beneath today’s headlines, while at the same time painting an unnervingly dystopian portrait of what might lie down the road. The world in “Exit West” is, in many respects, an extrapolation of the world we live in now, with wars like the one in Syria turning cities into war zones; with political crises, warp-speed technological changes, and growing tensions between nativists and migrants threatening to upend millions of lives.

  Hamid writes that in many places — like the San Francisco Bay area, one stop on Saeed and Nadia’s journey — “the apocalypse appeared to have arrived and yet it was not apocalyptic, which is to say that while the changes were jarring they were not the end, and people found things to do and ways to be and people to be with, and plausible desirable futures began to emerge, unimaginable previously, but not unimaginable now.”

  Follow Michiko Kakutani on Twitter: @michikokakutani

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