Hey everyone welcome back to the Waterstones vlog. It's Will here. I'm wondering
whether you, like me, have that thing where you read books and they often are
very sort of separate things you know you start a book you enjoy it you finish
it you move on to the next one and it's completely different. But every now and
then I have this thing where I'm reading and two books that I read back-to-back
are weirdly connected. And it's not something that I do on purpose, I haven't
read them together because I think there's a connection but there will be
these weird thematic connections perhaps, ways in which the two books
absolutely complement each other and become richer because of that connection.
I'm thinking of this recently because I read two books which are absolutely like
this but weirdly because they're almost the opposite of each other.
Let me explain more. The first of these books is this one here this is Exit West
by Mohsin Hamid. He was shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize last year with this
novel, the second time he's been shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize
which is a pretty good going rate there, and a fantastic book
It's the story of a boy and a girl, of a man and a woman Saeed and Nadia,
who come together and fall in love but the brilliant conceit of the book is that
around the world these doors start to appear where people can move
instantaneously almost from one part of the world to another. Which sort of
renders the idea of borders and immigration control rather redundant. And
what happens of course is that people from sort of war-torn or famine ravaged
countries are able to move to more affluent places like London and San
Francisco and there's this sort of huge refugee crisis around the world people
who live in those countries suddenly feeling like they're under threat from
all these people who are able to move very freely into the country. It throws
up lots of very interesting questions about refugees about immigration about
the world that we live in and as I say with this brilliant central conceit,
which is these doors and it's because of the simplicity of that idea that the
book is almost immediately canonical. And I'm thinking of other recent books like
the power by Naomi Alderman which also has a brilliantly simple idea at its
centre which sort of is able to then tip the balance in the sort of power
between the sexes. These books are so simple with the
concept but it's a way that sort of shifts your perception as a reader and
makes you see things completely differently which I absolutely loved.
So Exit West is a fantastic book, filled with really, really interesting ideas and
and these two lovely characters that you you can't help but care about. I got
the chance to speak to Mohsin Hamid about it because he popped into
Waterstones and we had a chat. He's very smart very funny, very interesting and
very humane actually and so we had a really good chat. So you will see links
to that interview down below I've chopped up into three pieces to make it
a little bit more digestible, links will be popping up above my head as well.
We spoke about home and identity and hope and Brexit of course. But really, really
interesting so do take some time to watch that when you've got a moment.
So that is Exit West, a book that I would really, really recommend. And as I say the
main thrust of it is about this idea of removing the journey of the immigrant,
removing the obstruction, removing the border. And this is interesting because
the next book that I happened to read was this one: The Line Becomes A River by
Francisco Cantu, which is going to be published at the very beginning of March.
And the reason why this interesting is because Cantu was a U.S. Border Patrol
agent and he worked in the desert along the Mexico border and his job there was
to retrieve people who had got lost in their journey from Mexico to America and
eventually process them and then get them back to Mexico. Now this is
obviously hugely resonant and relevant because of the idea of building this
wall between Mexico and America. Obviously a border exists but it's you
know hugely contentious and as you sort of read this book you get a much better
understanding of what it really means to try and undertake that journey from
Mexico to America. So that's why I think of this as being the opposite book to
Exit West because whilst Exit West removes the journey and focuses on the
experience of the immigrant once they are in a country and indeed the focus
looking at the people who live in the country and how their lives are affected
by the immigration, this book is absolutely all about the border. It is
about the journey, it is about how hard and difficult and
life-threatening it is. In fact there are so many deaths of people trying to
undertake this journey you realize just how dangerous it is. And so it is all
about what separates people and for Cantu who is a third generation
Mexican-American it is about this very, very confused border of identity with
yourself when you are American but also you have this Mexican famil,y this is
often the case with Border Patrol agents, it makes sense of course that they would
have this mixed heritage and so this conflict of these two countries
separated by this sort of you know this line that's sort of bizarrely drawn on a
map and in fact he goes into the details about where the border is, why it is
there, the history of how it was drawn up and how at one point it does actually
follow the line of the Rio Grande and you know depending on where you're
swimming in the water you may be in one country or another. His writing is
unbelievably good and he is brilliant about so many things and the experience
of crossing through the desert, his experiences as an agent and as the book
progresses there is a very personal story that happens actually for him and
this is actually after he's left the service and started to train as a
writer which makes it all sort of really horrifically personal. And so there's
quite a sort of knife in the gut towards the end of the book where you feel really very
painfully involved in what's going on. And there is something, that's where the
the border and the division between these two countries becomes really
apparent. I'm not gonna say any more because I want to spoil it but as
you can probably guess I would heartily recommend it. It's a fantastic
book and I think both of these books together complemented each other
brilliantly. Because despite the fact that they're talking about very opposite
things; one about the immigrant experience and the other about the
border and the journey, I think that they both have a similar sentiment which is
that borders are of course by their very nature divisive and the things that
unite us are far more important and sort of obvious than the things that
divide us which are very artificial and false. So there we go,
that is The Line Becomes A River by Francisco Cantu which is published on
the 1st of March and Exit West by Mohsin Hamid. This is a hardback but
there's a new paperback which is all colorful and lovely. So there we go, two
books almost completely opposite, weirdly connected, loved them both.
There we go! Thanks for watching, do please leave likes and comments and all that
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