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Jul 23, 2017 Philip rated it it was amazing

Shelves: 2017-releases, author-man, author-of-color, fantasy, contemporary, top-5-2017

4.5ish stars.

Hamid somehow manages to make this intimate and universal; it's magical but also so grounded in reality; it's melancholy but hopeful. It's about freedom, connection, struggle and discovery. And it just hit home for me.

I was engaged from the beginning when I was first introduced to the heroes of the book, Nadia and Saeed. The magic of the doors and the speculation they provide took it further and made me ponder without feeling like I was being compelled to pick sides or consider a sp 4.5ish stars.

Hamid somehow manages to make this intimate and universal; it's magical but also so grounded in reality; it's melancholy but hopeful. It's about freedom, connection, struggle and discovery. And it just hit home for me.

I was engaged from the beginning when I was first introduced to the heroes of the book, Nadia and Saeed. The magic of the doors and the speculation they provide took it further and made me ponder without feeling like I was being compelled to pick sides or consider a specific view. What would happen if thousands of migrants from various countries suddenly appeared in various other countries all over the globe, crossing borders with little possibility of resistance? How would the rest of the world react? How would the migrants proceed? How would it change the face of the world moving forward? The doors themselves don't need to be explained as anything more than metaphor and as devices to make the transport possible, that's not the point. In this story it doesn't matter as much how it happened as it does that it happened and what happens next?

The characterizations made me sympathize without feeling like the characters were written specifically to elicit sympathy. The choice to tell the story through the experiences of only two people, effectively denying anyone else substance, is an indulgent one, and one that I'm sure is frustrating to a lot of readers. To me, it demonstrates Hamid's understanding of human nature. The connection between pious Saeed and prickly Nadia in the face of such unstable circumstances is beautiful but unidealized- optimistic but tenuous.

There are obvious political inferences if you look for them, but I'll leave everyone else to interpret them how they will because they didn't affect my reading experience one way or the other. If nothing else, I'll say this novel humanizes immigration in both positive and negative ways, which I think is important regardless of your feelings on the subject.

Posted in Mr. Philip's Library ...more

69 likes · Like · see review

Jul 13, 2017 Bradley rated it liked it

Shelves: sci-fi, 2017-shelf, worldbuilding-sf, romance

I'm of two minds with this book.

My first mind revolves all around SF and SF concepts and good plots and great characters and deeper feels and plainly fun writing.

My second mind is content to have a novel that's mostly just about the immigrant condition and have a mostly realistic if slightly too regular action revolving around a strained relationship between two rather different people forced together by circumstances.

The second mind considers this novel to be rather literary and super-grounde I'm of two minds with this book.

My first mind revolves all around SF and SF concepts and good plots and great characters and deeper feels and plainly fun writing.

My second mind is content to have a novel that's mostly just about the immigrant condition and have a mostly realistic if slightly too regular action revolving around a strained relationship between two rather different people forced together by circumstances.

The second mind considers this novel to be rather literary and super-grounded in everyday and everyman concepts, attempting to be universal while barely touching upon anything extraordinary. This is true despite the fact that an apocalypse has come and portals to other places start turning normal doors into a random exodus on the Earth. This concept is barely explored. It's just a dirty handwavium and is used as a very convenient plot device. The fact that war devastates everything and all the normal lives are thrown into upheaval is just a setting, not something to have thoughts about.

This is fine if all we want is a character novel that makes light work of everyday chaos and instead tries to show us that normal relationships will still try to work (or fail) regardless of setting. We aren't required to have any kind of stability to live. Our two main characters here are caught in the normal struggles of very different people trying to make a go, drift apart, or otherwise dance the somewhat sad and complicated dance that is all relationships. Theirs is not a happy or exciting relationship, but it is a complicated one. The author is striving for realism and he gets realism.

The other reason this book might attract readers is the fact it's distinctly Muslim.

On the other hand, my first brain is rather disappointed. I wanted SF and this is about as mild as it comes. A brief mention that doors become doors elsewhere is all we get. The rest is just mild survival stuff with mostly running into nice people who give these kids a place to stay once they finally leave their homes. Later on, it's just the immigrant condition of making a living, falling apart, and later, wondering what happened.

As an SF it's almost nothing. At least in other "literary" works I could mention like DFW or Rand or Atwood, a lot more attention is given to making the SF interesting and thought-provoking.
This one was just a silly plot device that is below the standards of 1930's bad pulp. Sure, the literary realism side is nice and readable if that's what you want, but as an SF? Look elsewhere. It can't even be considered a post-apocalyptic.

I suppose I'm not really a fan of the super-super mild brand of literary fiction that borrows a single super-simple SF concept to tout itself as being on the forefront of the genre. It cheapens the really and truly excellent authors who have done amazing things in the field in so many brilliant ways.

If he's trying to fool the literary crowd into buying into the SF market, then fine, but that market needs to realize this kind of novel is baby/baby lite SF that's more like a shadow of a shadow of what it could be. I suppose it might be best to just call it literary and strike off the idea that it might be SF.

Ian M. Banks, this is not. ...more

40 likes · Like · see review

Mar 15, 2017 Lata rated it really liked it · review of another edition

Shelves: bipoc-author, x2017-read, bipoc-actor

A quiet, enjoyable read, thanks to Mohsin Hamid's creation of two lovely characters, Nadia and Saeed. I really enjoyed the way Nadia and Saeed met, became involved, and gradually grew older together, while living under terrific stress and worry and danger. I liked how the author never names Nadia's and Saeed's country where the situation devolves from tense initially, to outright terrifying and deadly. I liked the use of the portals from one country to the other, which lent the story a weird, so ...more

20 likes · Like · see review

Jul 15, 2017 Lindsay rated it liked it

Saeed and Nadia meet, begin a relationship, then have their city collapse in warfare forcing them to become refugees. This is the story of what happens to that relationship before and during that conflict and after they've become refugees.

There's a couple of interesting conceits used in this short piece of literary fiction.

One is the doors, a magic realism element that has doors opening up all over the world that lead to other places in the world. This allows the book to concentrate on the life ...more

19 likes · Like · see review

Aug 20, 2017 Viv JM rated it liked it · review of another edition

Shelves: author-male, read-in-2017, audio, fiction-contemporary, magical-realism, z-2017-author-male

I do think this book has a lot of interest to say about refugees and the migrant experience, but the concept of the "doors" just didn't work for me, and the whole book left me slightly underwhelmed, especially considering the hype it has received. Ah well. ...more

16 likes · Like · see review

Feb 21, 2017 Christina Pilkington rated it it was ok

Unpopular opinion time, but I did not care for this book.

The book focuses on the refugee crisis and what it means to be displaced. Which is all well and important, but the way this story was told, unending sentences held together with strings of commas, that felt more pretentious than lyrical, completely pulled me out of the story and left me feeling no connection whatsoever to these characters. I felt a disconnect to these characters the entire time I was reading because they were written as i ...more

4 likes · Like · see review

Jul 21, 2017 Jo rated it liked it · review of another edition

3.5 stars.

If I had to choose one word to describe this book, it would be "bittersweet." That ending (view spoiler) and I liked it all the more for that. An exquisite love story.

Interesting concept of doors opening the way to other parts of the world and the changes in society that result from such a facile and capricious way of traversing the globe. ...more

2 likes · Like · see review