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Una storia d’amore, ma anche la storia di due persone costrette ad abbandonare la propria terra diventata teatro di guerra che diventa così una storia di umanità contemporanea. Un romanzo visionario, che riprende uno dei fenomeni che più hanno caratterizzato la nostra epoca: le migrazioni. [a:Mohsin Hamid|16902|Mohsin Hamid|https://images.gr-assets.com/authors/1361498297p2/16902.jpg] utilizza un espediente brillante che gli evita di soffermarsi sui viaggi che le persone compiono, per concentrarsi piuttosto sulle vite vissute nei diversi luoghi dai protagonisti, Nadia e Saeed. I due ragazzi si innamorano quando ancora vivono nella loro città, prima che questa diventi invivibile a causa della guerra civile. E allora ecco che si aprono alcune porte, in grado di condurli dall’altra parte del mondo. Ne attraverseranno molte, Nadia e Saeed, ricostruendo ogni volta le loro esistenze e il loro legame, ma soprattutto crescendo ed evolvendo, con tutte le difficoltà e le sfide che affrontano gli esseri umani. Un romanzo forse fin troppo visionario e a tratti lirico: ho avuto l’impressione che avesse un’ottima idea di fondo, ma ho trovato la sua realizzazione per i miei gusti è troppo astratta e sbrigativa.

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4.0

Nadia spends her days doodling in the margins of insurance papers while answering phones, returns by motorbike in the evening to her flat where she has chosen to live alone, wears clothes that imply a religion she feels no affinity to. Saeed works in advertising, lives with his adoring parents, is not overtly religious and yet prays all the same. The two meet at an evening class and begin a relationship: Exit West starts out as a love story with a huge shadow over it - the city they inhabit is 'swollen by refugees' and 'not yet openly at war'. It is this 'not yet' that prepares us for what is to come: a story of conflict and displacement, all told with the same fatalistic simplicity; happiness underscored with the inevitability of loss and its accompanying sadness.

As communication to their city is cut off and the windows of their flats become shattered by blasts, and their fellow citizens are slaughtered in the streets, Nadia and Saeed must leave, relying on a network of secret doors that open on to different countries. These allow the couple to go from Greece to England to the United States, taking only a single step over a threshold each time.

Taking away the journey from the migrants, Hamid is able to recreate the Western world's perception of their experience whilst at once showing it to be an absurd one. In a flash the migrants go from existing in one place to existing in another, what in reality is the result of a long and perilous journey away from an even greater danger is seen only as new faces suddenly appearing where they weren't before. There is the simple yet drastic change of an addition of a large amount people in a short space of time; it's a change greatly feared by those who were born in the 'invaded' countries, people Hamid refers to as 'natives'.

The native's fear is played with and exposed in the reader by way of a clever scene at the beginning of the novel. Before the network of doors has been introduced, an unnamed woman is alone in a house without an alarm, fast asleep and with nothing but a t shirt on. A figure climbs from the dark of her closet only to bypass her and head for the window. What we think might happen to her, she who is the embodiment of vulnerability, shows our fears of strangers entering our safe spaces, the foreign encountering the familiar, and then shows those fears to be unfounded.

What is shown to be more realistic is the fear or fear itself and what it is capable of: that is, what can happen when the old are intimidated by the arrival of the new. A nightmarish vision of London is presented, with massacres in the parks as natives attempt to rid themselves of the influx of migrants.

However, these nightmares are somehow never the center of the story or the saddest thing about it: this is instead Nadia and Saeed falling out of love with each other. The change in these two over such a short novel is somehow what is most poignant about it. In this way, Exit West expresses paranoia over migration as a fear of our intrinsically transient lives - that is, our concern with demographics changing is at its heart a concern with change itself necessitated by time, and our own lack of control over these processes.

'We are all migrants in time', the narrator says; our fight over space is exacerbated because we do not have any control over this other dimension. Fleeing London, Nadia and Saeed work on a camp for the promise of a home on forty square metres of land. 'A mutually agreed time tax had been enacted, such that a portion of the income and toil of those who had recently arrived on the island would go to those who had been there for decades, and this time tax would be tapered in both directions, becoming a smaller and smaller sliver as one continued to reside, and then a larger and larger subsidy thereafter.' Staying still and so maintaining the illusion of equilibrium in time and space is rewarded, disrupting this is punished.

The movement of people, the inevitable changes over time is shown as natural as a Californian woman who has lived in the same house all her life reminisces on all the different people who have lived there with her before moving on. 'For people bought houses the way they bought and sold stocks, and every year someone was moving out and someone was moving in, and now all these doors from who knows where were opening, and all sorts of strange people were around.'

While at first seeming a desperately sad novel that portrays an unfamiliar and apocalyptic world, Exit West turns out to be strangely comforting, showing that migration and change is simply a part of life, and that though there are those who will violently resist it, change will come anyway and new communities will be formed.

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