The Last White Man by Mohsin Hamid: A review

Mohsin Hamid really needs to go to punctuation school. His sentences in this book run on forever, for a full paragraph in some cases. Very long paragraphs. I previously read his book Exit West and I don't remember that being a problem with that one, so I assume that he made a conscious choice to write this book in this manner. I can't speak for other readers but I just found it distracting and annoying.

The story is briefly summarized in the very first sentence: “One morning Anders, a white man, woke up to find he had turned a deep and undeniable brown.” At some time and place that are never fully identified, people start changing color. At least White people start changing color. We see this through the eyes of the protagonist, Anders, a White man who wakes up one morning to discover that his skin is turning dark. He talks to his lover, Oona, about it, and soon learns that this is happening to others as well. This creates an unsettled atmosphere and some people seek to resist the change, but how?

Predictably, when people are faced with something they don't understand with all the shock and fear that result, conspiracy theories abound and this creates even more shock and fear and resultant violence and doomsaying. And yet, life goes on. People are born and they live and die.

We meet Anders' father and Oona's mother. Anders' father is a widower dying of cancer. Oona's mother is a widow in mourning for the loss of her son, Oona's brother. She is easy prey for conspiracy theorists. She just soaks it all in. She was, in fact, one of the most interesting characters in the book for me. She sees herself and the people she comes from as "the only people who could not call themselves a people in this country, and there are not so many of them left." She feels they are on their way to becoming extinct.

Long ago, I read Franz Kafka's The Metamorphosis. I've seen this book compared to that one. In fact, some reviewers have referred to it as a reimagining of that classic. Those comparisons are apt, although in this case, instead of turning into a giant insect, the protagonist and many others remain human but change colors. But in a world where skin color still defines an individual in the minds of many people, perhaps the change from white to dark is not unlike being changed into a bug that is vulnerable to being squashed.

This was an interesting idea for a book and it was generally well-written except for my caveat about the run-on sentences. That was just extremely annoying to me and hindered my enjoyment of the book. Moreover, I know that my sainted English teacher, Mrs. Rubenstein, would not be amused, and I thank you, dear Mrs. Rubenstein, for teaching me better.   

Exit West by Mohsin Hamid: A review

Nadia and Saeed are a young couple living in an unnamed city in an unnamed country in an unnamed part of the world. They are also living in an unspecified time, although it is a time when social media and the internet are integral parts of their lives and when drones hover in the air spying on the happenings below. The place where they live is about to be riven by conflict between militants and the government, a most uncivil war.

The reader is left with the impression that their home is somewhere in the Middle East, although truthfully, for all we know, it could just as easily be Detroit or Memphis or Des Moines. We do know that the two have brown skin and that Saeed is a committed Muslim who prays regularly and that Nadia is independent and non-religious, although she wears the black robe of a Muslim woman as a kind of disguise.

I think all of this non-specificity is meant to make the characters into kind of Everypersons, someone with whom every reader can identify. There is also a surreal and magical realism element to their story, all of which made it a bit difficult for me to...assimilate. But in the end, I felt it all worked pretty well and my frustration with some of the vagueness of the story was secondary to the fact that I felt empathy for the characters and through them I was perhaps better able to understand the plight of refugees.

For this story is about refugees and the mass migration of people from one area of the world to another because of political and religious conflicts, as well as for economic and climate reasons. The device which the author uses to get his refugees from one place to another is one of the aforementioned magic realism elements - a kind a magic door which they pass through.

Saeed and Nadia originally pass through one of the doors in their city and end up on the Greek island of Mykonos, where they live for a time in a crowded camp of other refugees from various parts of the world. Later they pass through another magic door and come to London. Once again they are in a community of world refugees, a community that is resented and hated by nativists who harass and try to push them out. In time, an agreement is worked out to allow the refugees to live their lives and to receive some minimal support and assistance from the government.

Soon, however, Nadia and Saeed again grow restive as they also seem to be growing apart and they decide to try door number three. This time they find themselves in Marin, California. They set about making lives for themselves there but continue to grow apart and to pursue different directions in their lives.

This is a story that is drenched in sadness and loss, but is also hopeful as the migrant refugees keep overcoming barriers and striving toward something better for themselves. It sympathetically explores the contemporary migrant experience that is so much a part of our world. There is much violence and bloodshed in the story but it mostly occurs offstage so we only hear about it second-hand. It was a story that gave me much to contemplate and left me to acknowledge the truth of a couple of lines from the book:

“We are all migrants through time.” 

and

“When we migrate, we murder from our lives those we leave behind.”

My rating: 4 of 5 stars