"We are all migrants through time"
Every now and then you pick up a book and are transported to
some far away world or location that speaks to the everyday in a way that a
more literal, nonfiction treatise might not. Such is the case here. I love
Hamid’s writing, it is both bare and beautiful. He really got my attention with
The Reluctant Fundamentalist in a far more aggressive fashion. This
novel, however, ebbs and flows like the crashing waves of young love, all
enveloping to begin with and then petering out into the sands of time. Getting
my hands on a copy has been high on my agenda since The Book Club featured it in April of this year.
The love story begins in an atmosphere of growing violence
and terror with escalating civil unrest at times keeping the lovers apart and
finally bringing them together. The reader is unsure of the exact location of
their home, just the need to escape and that is where things get really interesting.
Doors open up to other locations in the world and random cities experience huge
influxes of refugees through these magic portals. First Mykonos becomes
overwhelmed by mass immigration, culminating in violence that the pair must
escape, via the assistance of a young local girl, through another door to a
mansion in London. Empty spaces are filled by the needy as the world magically
faces the plight of the refugee. On such an epic scale of violence, fear and
cultural clash, Saeed and Nadia’s relationship weathers and alters in a
profoundly human fashion which reflects the way shared experiences bind you,
while growth and maturity often send you in different directions.
It can’t just have been PMT; I actually felt quite teary
when I finished this, it was just beautiful. In a world full of terror and
violence, it’s reassuring that regardless of where we come from, what we choose
to believe in or not, what language we speak or who we vote for, there are some
experiences that transcend all of these and on that level we can all understand
each other a little better. One can hope at any rate.
5 out of 5 times I’ve opened up a door and thought, “Toto, I have a feeling
we're not in Kansas anymore.”
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