The Last White Man

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.

District 9 vibes - less sci-fi/body horror, more the dystopian world used to make a more intimate portrait and statement on racism, a much more hopeful rendition. 
Central theme is racism, how it affects people's lives, what it could look like if it didn't, but it's certainly bringing in other strings of what's wrong with modern society (self-interest evident on social media, larger occurence of  chemical dependency/drug addiction, police on the side of white supremacists by their action or inaction, performative allyship “to be the sort of person who would have helped them”).
Holy run-on sentences, Batman! An adjustment period is necessary, especially if you're reading aloud, but the style fits with the sort of mental spiral each of the characters seems to start in. 
Both main characters caring for elderly parents who are sick/dying, with different perspectives in an increasingly divided world, a symbol of that previous generation, how it felt about race, how it can change/how it will die out? 
Space for connection and release in younger generation - the idea that you could possibly think differently enough to reach out to people you have felt uncomfortable doing so with before - that you could take it as a new start, a breaking with the old you, especially if the old you was riddled with  emotional pain. 
Loss = universal human experience.  
The wretched things that fear does - Oona's mother - so set in her beliefs that she can only meet this future with fear of the change.
Publishing date and certain passages suggests real life experience of quarantine may have worked it's way into the story.
Novella length allowed author to tell the whole story, didn't  feel short-changed, but given the sentence phrasing and rephrasing, I wonder if the narrative might also have managed the same impact as a short story?

It's a different story, certainly, but if anybody knows of anything in the contemporary/speculative genre that focuses on characters' shifted perspective after sudden transformation of GENDER, I would be very curious to read such a treatment, and see where the author takes it (I'll pass on anything that smacks of reinforcing heteronormativity, obvy).