The Last White Man by

From the internationally bestselling author of Exit West, a story of love, loss, and rediscovery in a time of unsettling change. One morning, a man wakes up to find himself transformed. Overnight, Anders's skin has turned dark, and the reflection in the mirror seems a stranger to him. At first he shares his secret only with Oona, an old friend turned new lover. Soon, reports of similar events begin to surface. Across the land, people are awakening in new incarnations, uncertain how their neighbours, friends, and family will greet them. Some see the transformations as the long-dreaded overturning of the established order that must be resisted to a bitter end. In many, like Anders's father and Oona's mother, a sense of profound loss and unease wars with profound love. As the bond between Anders and Oona deepens, change takes on a different shading- a chance at a kind of rebirth - an opportunity to see ourselves, face to face, anew. The Last White Man uplifts our capacity for empathy and the transcendence it allows, a migration of consciousness powerfully enacted by the novel itself.

2.5 Exasperating choices of halting, record skipping sentence-building as a fitting lattice for emotional anemia and stunted speculation

Anders wakes up one morning to find that his skin has turned dark and he does not recognize himself. As he gets out of the house, he is startled to find that people seem to look at him differently than they did when he was a white man. His girlfriend, her mother, his father—each of these people has his own reaction to the changes in Anders. And then more people begin to change...

I like, but didn't love this book. Much of it felt like stories I've read many times before, especially sci-fi/fantasy. And the sentences that went on and on, most for at least a paragraph, and many for full pages. There was very little dialogue. I didn't really care about Anders or his girlfriend or his father or her mother.

I know the idea is timely, and I can see this would be an interesting book to discuss, and I've heard the author speak intelligently about this book.

But I am disappointed to say that it just didn't work well for me.

The best compliment I can pay to this book is this: I finished it.

I was seriously tempted to close it and get on with something better by the third page. The author's decision to write the whole thing as a series of over-long run-on sentences was so annoying I felt personally insulted that he expected me to read it. And yet, as I see others have said about other books by Hamid, it was a compelling read that I eventually decided to continue with. And I'm glad I did.

The lack of conventional sentence structure, coupled with the lack of personal names (there are two names in the book, two more than there are semicolons), give the whole narrative a hazy feel, almost drugged. I don't really know if there was a reason for that decision; it was annoying, and as far as I can tell added nothing. But it was a mildly interesting experience to read it, so ... here I am. Alive in spite of the annoyance.

Since each paragraph has exactly one period, at the end, it creates a rough rhythm, the sentences go on and on, with little tiny pauses for all the commas, commas, commas, commas, all the commas, and there are lots of commas in the book, they make it feel a little choppy, and you have to keep going to find a period, it's at the end of the paragraph, and when you get there you're just tired from reading on and on past all the commas, the many commas, and even though it actually was easy enough to keep the sense of the sentence, it did become tiring to slog through it all, usually there are periods to give your mind a small break in which to regroup for the next idea snippet, but Hamid doesn't believe in periods, I think he got bit by one when he was a small child, and he's seriously terrified of semicolons, I can't even begin to imagine the trauma one must have caused him, or maybe his mother got pushed down the stairs by a semicolon when she was pregnant with him, that would explain it.

But I actually did like the book quite a bit. It was worth reading. I give it only three stars because abusive authors don't deserve more than that.

I understood what the author was trying to do, but I think it was not accomplished in the way he thought. I found myself get angry at some points for just the way things were said or how certain view points were expressed. Overall, a great story especially for today's world that just lacks in the execution and writing style.