Love: Bounded or Boundless?

Love. Writing about love usually sucks, and I’ll be the first to admit that. Usually books that broach the topic of love do it in a very routine, simplified way. Oh, a character and another character from similar circumstances meet and slowly fall for eachother. Oh wow, they overcame an obstacle and became closer because of it. And would you look at that, they just got married and the story is over! This gets really—REALLY—tedious after awhile, which is probably why we never choose to write about love or offer our thoughts on it ourselves. It’s already been done so many times, another opinion, film, even book surely couldn’t bring anything new to the table. Here’s where Exit West comes in, Moshin Hamid’s attempt at putting a spin on something that normally, frankly, sucks. How did he do?

It’s probably evident I’m going to praise this book for painting a different picture, so if you want a TL;DR: Hamid accomplishes a differing perspective by making love do something it isn’t supposed to do—fade. Strangely enough, Hamid makes love fade not only with time, but with locations, customs, and even intimate events. 

When Saeed and Nadia begin their journey, their love is strong. Yet Saeed finds interest in Nadia only after noticing her, an event that takes weeks of them being in the same classroom to even happen. This already takes the usual narrative and flips it on it’s head, as usually characters meet, make eye contact, and that’s that. Here, Hamid does an incredible job with realism (something he later throws out with magic doors) and modernization. Most people can sympathize with this unlikely pairing because in a busy world like we have today, people are looking at their phones or too focussed on their jobs to have that instantaneous, fairy tale-like connection. 

As the journey continues, Saeed and Nadia start to have relationship troubles. Instead of walking through the door and embracing each other and freedom in Greece, Saeed quickly pulls away from Nadia upon their arrival. Despite going through traumatic event after traumatic event, such as running from a group of men in the dark, overcoming the perilous journey after perilous journey, Saeed and Nadia do the opposite of what they’re supposed to do: they drift apart. At the end of the novel, they don’t even bother keeping track of one another for fifty years! 

What’s interesting in Exit West isn’t the journey itself, but how it affects the relationship between Saeed and Nadia. By defying the usual love story, Hamid brings up an interesting question: does love have bounds? It seems the answer is yes, it does, as Saeed and Nadia quickly learn that when put in a different setting, with different people, they aren’t the same couple they had been previously.