Exit West

3.5 rounded up. I did this book a disservice reading it as audiobook, so that was part of my problem as the book went on. It’s very well written on a sentence level, but sort of meandering which made it hard to track on audio.

The narrator is omniscient and often summarizes chunks of time or events, and then other times zooms in and presents a moment in real time. It makes for a story that feels kept at a distance. Normally I like first person, character driven, introspective stories, but I didn’t mind the different feel of this story. It still had reflective moments and such expressive writing. That kept me in it.

The second half of the book felt less cohesive than the first half. It included moments with other characters that made the focus feel confused.

I love how the story of Saeed and Nadia played out. It felt loving and respectful. Neither was demonized - they are just different and grow in different ways.

I found this book a bit mixed. It's won lots of awards and it sounded intriguing - it's the story of two refugees, Nadia and Saeed, who meet in a conservative Muslim city and fall in love in the middle of a civil war. So far, seems normal for our world, and Nadia and Saeed could be two young people in any war-torn country anywhere. But as civil war breaks out, the story takes a twist. It turns out that ordinary doors can sometimes turn into "doors", which can open into an entirely different country. Refugees who can find and step through these "doors" are instantly transported to another country, and the world is adjusting to this new reality with mixed reactions, as borders are no longer secure and refugees can simply appear anywhere in any city.

Nadia and Saeed manage to find their way to a door and escape their collapsing city, and pretend to be already married in order to stay together and keep each other safe through a series of refugee areas and settlements. After staying in London for a while they end up in Marin, California, where they find a relative safety and start to build a new life.

The writing has moments where it's great, and the first part of the book is really interesting as Nadia and Saeed meet and then realize the doors are a real way to escape. But the last part of the book turns into a rather depressing account of a relationship slowly falling apart as Nadia and Saeed drift away from each other, and I felt as if the last third or so of the book was just a fairly depressing "he did", "she did" account of a failing romance. The interesting idea of the "doors" went nowhere, and nothing seemed to come to anything in the end, and even the final lines of the book are inconclusive. So, overall, bits of the book were interesting and well written, but the entire experience of the story itself was disappointing and depressing, so I wouldn't recommend this book unless you particularly like that vague, dreamy style of describing relationships falling apart.

A beautiful book about migration, and how that might look in the face of one big change in how the world works. Like so many migration stories, it starts with an intensely sad premise, and even though the book is not an unrelenting wallow in that, the sadness is never exactly absent.

It's written in a very distinctive style, full of long sentences that at times can be achingly beautiful, and at times feel like a useful device for conveying the complexity of the characters' entangled lives, but at other times also become rather grating, as though the author's forgotten that breaking a paragraph up into sentences is an option available to him, or just become too reliant on this device because when it does work it works so well, and I suppose I'm particularly sensitive to this because long run-on sentences are a common flaw in my own writing, but by the end of the book it was definitely taking something away from what was otherwise a wonderful read.