Thomas Gaffney reviewed Exit West: A Novel by Mohsin Hamid
Review of 'Exit West: A Novel' on 'Goodreads'
5 stars
Really enjoyed this one. Well-written and touching.
231 pages
English language
Published Sept. 11, 2017 by Riverhead Books.
5 stars
(2 reviews)
moving to outside.ofa.dog reviewed Exit West by Mohsin Hamid
Review of 'Exit West' on 'LibraryThing'
4 stars
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, …
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.