Exit West

Exit West by Mohsin Hamid

I chose to listen to this book on Audible.  I found it less compelling and able to hold my concentration than other recent audio reads.  Elmet for example, and The Sound of One Hand Clapping.

This is the second novel by this author that I have read and for me does not measure up to the standard of that best seller.  The Reluctant Fundamentalist, told the story of a Pakistani man who decides to leave his high-flying life in America after a failed love affair and the terrorist attacks of 9/11. It was published in 2007 and became a million-copy international best seller, reaching No.4 on the New York Times Best Seller list. The novel was shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize, won several awards including the Anisfield-Wolf Book Award and the Asian American Literary Award, and was translated into over 25 languages. The Guardian selected it as one of the books that defined the decade.

Of Exit West the Amazon review states:  In a country teetering on the brink of civil war, two young people meet—sensual, fiercely independent Nadia and gentle, restrained Saeed. They embark on a furtive love affair, and are soon cloistered in a premature intimacy by the unrest roiling their city. When it explodes, turning familiar streets into a patchwork of checkpoints and bomb blasts, they begin to hear whispers about doors—doors that can whisk people far away, if perilously and for a price. As the violence escalates, Nadia and Saeed decide that they no longer have a choice. Leaving their homeland and their old lives behind, they find a door and step through. . . .
Exit West follows these remarkable characters as they emerge into an alien and uncertain future, struggling to hold on to each other, to their past, to the very sense of who they are. Profoundly intimate and powerfully inventive, it tells an unforgettable story of love, loyalty, and courage that is both completely of our time and for all time.

The Guardian review attempts to analyse the structure of the book, the mixing of genre whilst saying very little about the story the narrative attempts to tell.

https://www.theguardian.com/books/2017/mar/12/exit-west-mohsin-hamid-review-refugee-crisis

Clearly Exit West has found favour as a potential prize winner:

SHORTLISTED FOR THE 2017 MAN BOOKER PRIZE

FINALIST FOR THE 2017 KIRKUS PRIZE

SHORTLISTED FOR THE BROOKLYN PUBLIC LIBRARY AWARD

SHORTLISTED FOR THE NEUSTADT INTERNATIONAL PRIZE FOR LITERATURE

custos rerum perditarum repertor

The Keeper of Lost Things by Ruth Hogan

Once a celebrated author of short stories now in his twilight years, Anthony Peardew has spent half his life collecting lost objects, trying to atone for a promise broken many years before.  Every lost item holds within it a story. Perhaps it was a treasured memento, or a useful item thoughtlessly left behind. Whatever the case, Anthony Peardew collects those items and the histories he imagines for them.   He writes stories about their origins.  His first story collection was a success, but as Anthony ages, his work becomes darker and his publisher displeased.

Anthony knows loss. His fiancée, Therese, gave him a communion medallion that depicted St. Therese of the Roses. It was a thank you for the rose garden he planted at what was to be their first home. “It’s for you, to say thank you for my beautiful garden and to remind you that I will love you forever, no matter what,” Therese said as she bestowed the gift. “Promise me you’ll keep it with you always.”

The day he lost it was the day she died.  Realising he is running out of time, he leaves his house and all its lost treasures to his assistant Laura, the one person he can trust to fulfil his legacy and reunite the thousands of objects with their rightful owners.

These lost objects are more than Anthony’s attempt at salvation after losing his love, and more than a publisher’s means to an end. When Anthony dies and Laura inherits the collection she becomes the Keeper of Lost Things. Anthony leaves instructions: Laura should return the items to their rightful owners, in hopes that she’ll heal at least one heart. In the process, she befriends a neighbour and Anthony’s gardener. They become key to Laura’s own healing after a failed marriage.

As the trio works to reunite the items with their owners, they periodically encounter sadness—both their own and that which seems to accompany the objects themselves. That’s part of living, Laura’s young friend says. “If you never get sadness, how do you know what happiness is like?” In The Keeper of Lost Things, debut novelist Ruth Hogan ties together the lives of her characters and the objects they discover. It’s a quiet but beautifully intricate novel that will remind readers that we are each other’s points of connection. When life becomes confusing or sad, showing a bit of kindness and appreciation for each others’ stories can lead to redemption.







The Nest by Cynthia D'Aprix Sweeney 

    ‘I couldn't stop reading or caring about the juicy and dysfunctional Plumb family’ AMY POEHLER
‘A masterfully constructed, darkly comic, and immensely captivating tale…Cynthia D'Aprix Sweeney is a real talent’ ELIZABETH GILBERT
When black sheep Leo has a costly car accident, the Plumb siblings’ much-anticipated inheritance is suddenly wiped out. His brother and sisters come together and form a plan to get back what is owed them – each grappling with their own financial and emotional turmoil from the fallout. As ‘the nest’ fades further from view, they must decide whether they will build their lives anew, or fight to regain the futures they had planned . . .
Ferociously astute, warm and funny, The Nest is a brilliant debut chronicling the hilarity and savagery of family life.

Of Human Suffering

Monsieur Linh and His Child by Philippe Claudel

I read this in English translation and my impression is that it is a good one.  The short story, a novella, is told in simple style and this poignant, moving and ultimately sad novel did indeed stir feelings that remained with me after the final sentences had been read.

Traumatized by memories of his war-ravaged country, and with his son and daughter-in-law dead, Monsieur Linh and His Child is a remarkable novel with an extraordinary twist, a subtle portrait of friendship and a dialogue between two cultures.

 Monsieur Linh travels to a foreign land to bring the child in his arms to safety. The other refugees in the detention centre are unsure how to help the old man; his caseworkers are compassionate, but overworked. Monsieur Linh struggles beneath the weight of his sorrow, and becomes increasingly bewildered and isolated in this unfamiliar, fast-moving town. And then he encounters Monsieur Bark. They do not speak each other's language, but Monsieur Bark is sympathetic to the foreigner's need to care for the child. Recently widowed and equally alone, he is eager to talk, and Monsieur Linh knows how to listen. The two men share their solitude, and find friendship in an unlikely dialogue between two very different cultures.

In contrast to Monsieur Linh and His Child , my subsequent read is a 700-page novel which was short-listed for the 2015 Man Booker.  A Little Life by Hanya Yanagihara is a bleak, unrelentingly harrowing story of four young men who meet at college and focuses on one of the quartet in particular.  Malcolm, JB, Willem and Jude, randomly assigned as college roommates, become best friends. Bright, ambitious and talented, they all move to New York, pursuing different careers: handsome Willem works as a waiter while auditioning as an actor; JB creates trendily experimental art while dreaming of fame as a representational painter; Malcolm comes from a wealthy, demanding family and worries that his architecture career will not impress his father; Jude is a young lawyer, working for the public defender’s office. The reader predicts that some will succeed, some will fail; some will build happy relationships, some won’t; tragedies will strike and be overcome. 

The reader is quite mistaken, however: before long, all four friends are blessed with immoderate professional success, while two of them rapidly recede into the background, with Jude St Francis emerging as the novel’s protagonist.

His first 15 years consist of unrelieved, grotesque, extravagant abuse: and then an authorial switch is flipped. For the rest of his life (with the important exception of one disastrously abusive relationship), Jude encounters only selfless love and kindness: the patron saint of lost causes becomes a lost cause surrounded by saints. His friends are all very concerned with Jude, to the exclusion of being concerned about anyone else, including themselves.  In real life, people tend to get tired of other people’s repetition compulsions, largely because they are consumed by their own dramas. But this is a little life that tilts toward a large fairy tale, about cruelty and nobility, evil and goodness.  The novel deals with Jude's anguish, his self-hatred, his life-long habit of 'cutting' - the unfathomable tendency of people so wounded and traumatised by what others have inflicted upon them, that they blame themselves.  I lost count of the number of times Jude utters the words "I'm sorry."  You get the feeling as the novel progresses that there cannot be a redemption, a happy ending.  This haunting novel is one to which my thoughts will often in a world where instances of child abuse, many of long-years standing, continue to surface to the light of day.

In Steven Galloway's novel The Cellist of Sarajevo, the author mixes real and imagined characters.  It is set in Bosnia's capital during the civil war of the Nineties, opens with a cellist sitting by a window. He is playing Albinoni's Adagio while outside a queue of people wait to buy bread. Seconds later, a shell explodes in the marketplace and they are killed. The cellist stands at the window all night and all the next day. After 24 hours, he carries his cello down to the carnage-strewn street. He positions a stool in a crater and begins once again to play the Adagio. He goes on to do this every day for 22 days, one day for each victim.

Snipers in the hills overlook the shattered streets of Sarajevo.  But Arrow believes she's different from the snipers on the hills around the city. She shoots only soldiers.  But they kill unarmed civilians. Knowing that the next bullet could strike at any moment, the ordinary men and women below strive to go about their daily lives as best they can. Kenan faces the agonizing dilemma of crossing the city to get water for his family and neighbour.  He dare not take his household to help for fear they will be killed by the snipers. If he dies, what will happen to his family?

The last of Galloway's four characters, the baker Dragan, lives mostly in the past and, gripped by fear, does not know who among his friends he can trust. . He no longer knows which is the real Sarajevo: the one he sees today or the one in his memories, 'where people were happy, treated each other well, lived without conflict'.

Galloway threads these individual stories together, narratives crisscrossing: three weeks in the lives of individuals struggling to survive as their beloved city is besieged. The characters of Arrow and the cellist are based upon real people, but in his examination of their feelings and motives, Galloway makes them his own. They are worn out with war, fearful of what will become of them and their loved ones. Only the cellist and his music brings hope - hope that mankind is still capable of humanity, that the old world is not completely lost, that the war has not destroyed everything. This short novel employs a sparse style with the simple prose of a short story.  Galloway's style is sparse, pared down; his prose has the deceptive simplicity of a short story.

Reading the book was an experience similar in some ways to that of reading Monsieur Linh and his Child.  People, emotionally wounded, trying to live their lives as if things were normal, when that is far from the case.  Such reads are made all the more powerful for the brevity with which the story is told.  They are gems of literature.