4 3 2 1

Abstract

Saeed and Nadia meet, both are comfortable in their stations in life. Nadia is a fully covered woman who surprises Saeed when he learns she rides a motorcycle and lives on her own, bucking the norms he assumes she follows based on her dress. Their tentative relationship is both strengthened and weakened by the civil unrest that begins to permeate their formerly quiet city. When bombs disconnect them from their phones, the budding couple cannot speak to each other. Meanwhile, their desire for each other grows exponentially due to their forced separation. When terror strikes Saeed’s family, the young couple decide they must take advantage of the “doors” that pop up around town and that lead people into another country. When Saeed and Nadia walk through the first of many mystical doors, they arrive in Greece, where they are introduced to the life of a migrant. They choose to treat this first stop as a tourism trip, during which they sightsee and make a few friends. But when Greece begins to pressure the migrants, the couple enter another “door.” They realize they are in London. The story continues as the couple move more and more west until their story ends in Marin, California. An extended meditation on the challenges and dangers of migration, Exit West allegorizes migration through its picaresque love story. The novel works to show the microcomplications of migration while nations argue on macro terms. Hamid humanizes a migration crisis that has become background noise to those not living it. How else can one describe the lack of worldwide outrage and compassion such a migration should cause? Hamid summarizes the nature of migration when musing on Saeed’s decision to leave his father in the war zone when the latter refuses to depart from the land where his wife is buried: “For when we migrate, we murder from our lives those we leave behind.” In the end, Saeed and Nadia learn more about themselves and their relationship, and much is left behind upon their arrival in the West. Colleen Lutz Clemens Kutztown University Paul Auster. 4 3 2 1. New York. Henry Holt. 2017. 866 pages. Is it an indulgence to resist the arbitrariness of having only one life to live? Rather than lodge one’salternativepathsinavarietyofcharacters in different plots or give one character impossible dreams, why not set up several roads—all taken—for the same character? Something like that thinking seems to have motivated Paul Auster to depart from his usual minimalistic and highly controlled style in this mammoth novel of the several lives of one Archibald Isaac Ferguson. Born in 1947 in Newark to Jewish parents, attending almost the same schools, a lover of New York City, and, in three cases, in the process of becoming a published writer, the Archie Fergusons grow up, chronologically and sequentially in subchapters (3.1, 3.2, 3.3, 3.4, 4.1, etc.) during the quiet and then tumultuous 1950s and ’60s. Readers may choose to tolerate or take notes in coping with the initial confusions as one segmented Archie story gives way to another for the same time period. Different friends and experiences help separate the stories, differences that become more distinct after high school. As opposed to his usual practice, Auster chose a third-person approach to each Archie, the narrative voice often verging into analytical omniscience. The voice comments on character and supplies historical details, sometimes so abundant as to constitute separate narratives, particularly for the protests and violence of the sixties. Archie is marginally involved through friends, lovers, and—in one plot— as a college reporter. One is led to the inevitable question about realistic novels firmly lodged in particular periods: Are the characters’ lives and the web of details attached to them described interestingly enough? Is there enough interest in the character to tunnel through context that may not be so interesting ? I read on and sometimes “through,” the pulse of Ferguson’s lives sustaining me more than suspense points or large World Literature in Review 92 WLT MAY–AUGUST 2017 conflicts. I feel less qualified to judge the attraction of the detailed historical events for those who did not live through those...