Monday Muses: Exit West

Today on Monday Muses, I’m talking about a book I just finished called: Exit West by Mohsin Hamid. This book was lovingly brought in to me by a customer at the tea shop. I was excited to read it, but it was a fiction novel. I love fiction, but I have a silly rule that I only read fiction when I’m overwhelmed and stressed. So, it sat for a couple of months untouched. Until, you know, I needed it. Last month, between family illnesses and new challenges at the store, I was ready for an escape. Exit West was the perfect read for how I was feeling.

Spoiler Alert! (If you want to read the book, I would stop reading now)

Exit West begins as a factual novel detailing the life of what it would be like living in a war torn city. The characters, seeking normality, continue taking classes, shopping, scrolling through their phones, trying to forget the chaos that surrounds them. The story depicts the lives of two characters that meet in class and begin to date. We watch the characters relationship evolve as their country falls apart.

As the city begins to fall, we hear rumors of secret doors leading to other places. At first, I thought the characters were so desperate to leave their situation, they were driven to madness and that the doors were imaginary. Then, just as the city is falling the two characters are taken through a door. Again, I found myself intellectualizing that it must be a tunnel underground. The door leads to the Greece. There the characters join a group of refugees. Soon, the camp began running out of supplies so the characters travel through another door, London.

This is where I really fell in love with the book. All over the world doors began becoming enchanted and lead to different places in the world, like random doors, sometimes in people’s homes. This gave people in the story the freedom of escaping bad situations (like civil wars) and made the world almost smaller in a sense. In the sense that we stop feeling that people and places are too far away to impact each other’s lives. In turn, increasing empathy for one another through greater interconnectedness.