"They learn that the doors have become a global system of exit and entry. The “doors out, which is to say the doors to richer destinations, were heavily guarded, but the doors in, the doors from poorer places, were mostly left unsecured.”
Throughout Saeed and Nadia’s story, Hamid intersperses vignettes of magic-realist migration, in which the circumstances and desires that govern the outcome of each crossing are as unpredictable as the trickster doors themselves. An old man from Brazil crosses to Amsterdam, meets another old man, and wordlessly falls in love. While contemplating suicide, a man in England comes across a portal to Namibia, where he remakes his life. A man sees two Filipino girls emerge in Tokyo, and follows them, “fingering the metal in his pocket as he went.” When refugees emerge from doors in San Diego, an elderly veteran asks the police if he can be of assistance; they ask him to leave, and the veteran realizes that he, like the migrants, doesn’t have anywhere to go.
There is, in “Exit West,” constant underlying movement, and a sense that intrinsic laws of moral physics are at work."
http://www.newyorker.com/culture/jia-tolentino/a-novel-about-refugees-that-feels-instantly-canonical
FB: "Hamid rewrites the world as a place thoroughly, gorgeously, and permanently overrun by refugees and migrants, its boundaries reconfigured so that “the only divisions that mattered now were between those who sought the right of passage and those who would deny them passage.”"
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