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2022 SHORTLIST #04. Exit West, Mohsin Hamid
(2017, Riverhead Books)
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Dramatic Recitation (Musical Actor. Eun-young Ko)
https://youtube.com/shorts/7CjfDUdnFSE?feature=share
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72 p.
Rumors had begun to circulate of doors that could take you elsewhere, often to places far away, well removed from this death trap of a country. Some people claimed to know people who knew people who had been through such doors. A normal door, they said, could become a special door, and it could happen without warning, to any door at all. Most people thought these rumors to be nonsense, the superstitions of the feeble-minded. But most people began to gaze at their own doors a little differently nonetheless.
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94 p.
Saeed desperately wanted to leave his city, in a sense he always had, but in his imagination he had thought he would leave it only temporarily, intermittently, never once and for all, and this looming potential departure was altogether different, for he doubted he would come back, and the scatterting of his extended family and his circle of friends and acquaintances, forever, struck him as deeply sad, as amounting to the loss of a home, no less, of his home.
95 p.
Both of them, though, whatever their misgivings, had no doubt that they would leave if given the chance.
98 p.
but that is the way of things, for when we migrate, we murder from our lives those we leave behind.
137 p.
Nadia and Saeed, who had run from war already, and did not know where next to run, and so were waiting, waiting, like so many others.
165 p.
To flee forever is beyond the capacity of most: at some point even a hunted animal will stop, exhausted, and await its fate, if only for a while.
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