By Mohsin Hamid
Riverhead Books, @2017, 231 pages

Mohsin Hamid is one of my favorite authors. This is because he is so adept at casting the spell, transporting me straight into his story and keeping me there. I found this out first with his book The Reluctant Fundamentalist.

I believe Exit West is a book that every high school student in the U.S. should read. It’s a book about two university students, a man and a woman, who come together as a couple as their society unravels. In their quest to survive, they find they must flee their home and “Exit West.”

Hamid employs the use of magical realism to skip over the mundane details of what it might take to go West, inventing the concept of magical doors that transport people instantly to other locales. I’m a big fan of magical realism, so my attention narrows whenever I see it. Hamid doesn’t overdo it but instead uses it just enough to increase the intrigue of his novel.

Hamid is from Pakistan, and I find that interesting as I am becoming more and more enthralled with their neighbor to the south, India.

I find myself painfully wanting the the couple in the novel to stay together, to fully love. But it is not to be. Instead, as they exit from their country, they also exit from each other. Hamid gracefully describes the disintegration of their relationship.

“Saeed and Nadia were loyal, and whatever name they gave their bond they each in their own way believed it required them to protect the other, and so neither talked much of drifting apart, not wanting to inflict a fear of abandonment, while also themselves quietly feeling that fear, the fear of the severing of their tie, the end of the world they had built together, a world of shared experiences in which no one else would share, a shared intimate language that was unique to them, and a sense that what they might break was special and likely irreplaceable.”

The words “likely irreplaceable” echo in my mind. Hamid touches on something deep, true, and wrapped with pain when it comes to relationships.

One question lingers for me as I finish this novel. Can women possibly have it all these days? —The man who cares and the man who is strong, and who is even strong enough to let his woman be herself, and allow her to claim that power that is the birthright of every human being, that of independent thought and action.