| Title | : | The Last White Man |
| Author | : | |
| Rating | : | |
| ISBN | : | 0593538811 |
| ISBN-10 | : | 9780593538814 |
| Language | : | English |
| Format Type | : | Hardcover |
| Number of Pages | : | 192 |
| Publication | : | First published August 2, 2022 |
One morning, Anders wakes to find that his skin has turned dark, his reflection a stranger to him. At first he tells only Oona, an old friend, newly a lover. Soon, reports of similar occurrences surface across the land. Some see in the transformations the long-dreaded overturning of an established order, to be resisted to a bitter end. In many, like Anders's father and Oona's mother, a sense of profound loss wars with profound love. As the bond between Anders and Oona deepens, change takes on a different shading: a chance to see one another, face to face, anew.
Hamid's The Last White Man invites us to envision a future - our future - that dares to reimagine who we think we are, and how we might yet be together.
The Last White Man Reviews
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Moshin Hamid has twice been shortlisted for the Booker Prize (from his four previous novels) most recently for “Exit West” – a novel which examined the issue of migration (and particularly a world which aimed to close borders) both conventionally via the story of a tentative relationship, and very unconventionally via the use of a magic realism device which effectively took supposedly uncontrolled migration to its logical extreme by postulating a series of mysterious Narnia-style doors which open between different parts of the world and which permit (at least temporarily) instant migration, and which from there explored less of a dystopian world than a utopian (or at least optimistic one) as people come to terms with the need to adapt to migration.
The book was a short, easy and enjoyable read but one which prompted reflection on its themes. It was one marked by a distinctive style of writing which was at some times very lyrical and other times almost mundane and with a mix of extremely long paragraph or page style sentences mixed with much shorter sections (although even there the use of “.And” to start sentences gave those sections a similar “run-on” quality when read in one’s head). I described the novel as very reminiscent of the writing of José Saramago, and particularly his “Blindness” - a fable type novel exploring the development of a premise of an alternate world, but also set against a gentle love story. In fact I said it was Saramago but with more punctuation.
This Hamid’s latest novel follows very much in the same lines - in this case examining racism as well effectively as the general mixing of races over time.
In this case the magic realism is introduced immediately - in the first line of the book, which is a very conscious echo of Kafka’s Metamorphosis
“One morning Anders, a white man, woke up to find he had turned a deep and undeniable brown”
And from there we have a society where over time, everyone white turns dark, until as per the title there is one man left white (and even that only temporarily).
We experience the story through one couple in a tentative love relationship - Andres (a gym instructor) and Oona, a yoga teacher (both originally white) as well as Ander’s traditional widower father (dying of cancer) and Oona’s conspiracy theorist widowed mother (still mourning her son, Oona’s brother).
The narrative style is for me a natural extrapolation of “Exit West” with far more run-on sentences - in this case with less punctuation and even more like Saramago.
Despite the huge similarities there are two senses in which the book is a reverse of “Exit West”.
The immediate introduction of the fantasy device is I think weaker than its mid-story introduction in “Exit West” as we get little sense of Andre and Oona’s former life or relationship. Instead what we get is a lengthy post script to the scenario, playing out in a society where everyone is brown but concentrating really on Andre and Oona - their relationship and their mourning for their loved ones. The upside of this is that it broadens the scope of the book beyond a didactic parable - as the book becomes a wider exploration of grief and of being truly seen, but the downside is that the book does seem to lose momentum.
And it is also very different to write the book from the viewpoint of white people, rather than the choice of migrants in the previous book, albeit this was a deliberate and effectively anthropological choice by the author based on ”This sense that whiteness itself was worth thinking about from within”.
The novel in its more fable-like element does have some nice initial touches - as Anders reacts violently to his own self (a concept perhaps taken a little too far in an incident in which a gun-toting homeowner confronts and shoots an intruder who is himself).
And another memorable and comic aspect is Andre’s cringy attempts to befriend the already dark cleaner as his previously white-only gym.
Oona’s mother was for me the real highlight of the book.
Already fiercely proud but defensive of her identity and “kind - the only people who could not call themselves a people in this country, and there were not so many of them left”, her conspiracy theories prove initially founded as she had read rumours of some early changers and after that her paranoia about the erasure of her identity (the culmination for her and those she follows of something they had warned about for many years) as well convinced that some form of backlash will come (a rather brilliant cameo has her feeling a little thrill when she hears an explosion that at last “something was happening, something big, maybe the tide was shifting, maybe the last real heroes had come” only to dissolve in tears when she realises it was thunder.
And like Exit West the book is effectively an optimistic one - in this case describing how, at least for some characters, they realise it is possible to embrace memories of their past and their previous identity while also accepting a new and much more inclusive identity.
Overall I thought this was another excellent, easy to read, enjoyable but thought provoking novel.
My thanks to Hamish Hamilon, Penguin Random House for an ARC via NetGalley. -
I really liked this book. I loved what Hamid is trying to do. How ambitious it is. What kinds of conversations if made me want to have. I’m not sure he fully pulls it off, but he gets very very close. So good.
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The beginning immediately grabs your attention but I was teeter-tottering the entire three hours about the entire premises and storytelling.
Audiobook….read by Mohsin Hamid
…..3 hours and 5 minutes
Weed…
Sex…
Genocide…
Skin color changes associated with racial tensions…
Loss, sickness, death,
Food, eating, not eating,
Father/son bonds,
Mother/daughter bonds,
Damaged restaurants and shops…
Odd….
But—-it’s definitely thought-provoking… I guess powerful and timely but odd — I don’t know it’s just odd!!
Should I say the word odd one more time? Ha! -
The Last White Man by Mohsin Hamid is a Magical Realism Story and So.Much.More!
He wakes up in the morning and the reflection he sees in the mirror isn't his. His skin has turned dark and he looks different. Anders looks like a Black man. He believes others will see him differently, too.
It happens overnight and it's happening everywhere. Every day more and more white people are turning dark.
Friends and family aren't recognizable. Anders' girlfriend Oona doesn't recognizable him at first. Neither does Oona's mother or Anders' father and both parents are uncomfortable with what's happening. They want everything to remain the same as it's always been.
People are revolting. Crime, violence, and resistance are increasing. It's chaos everywhere...
The premise of The Last White Man is totally out there, way out there. The thought-provoking side, especially the deeper in you read and finish, is absolutely mind-numbing. This is a dance, in lovely prose, between social constructionism and racism in a Science-Fiction story with a Dystopian feel. Social Science Fiction? Maybe.
This is an audiobook you could listen to several times and hear something new and different each time. I know this because, with so much detail to absorb, that's exactly what I did and it's exactly what happened. The author is the narrator and his voice is quiet, soothing, and matter of fact. I suggest listening at a slower speed to make it easier on yourself because the sentence are long and rambling and you don't want to miss a word.
I highly recommend The Last White Man to those who love a deep, thought-provoking read to swirl and ponder on, especially if you're a bit on the philosophical side, like me.
I purchased the audiobook of The Last White Man so I can listen to it again and again. I also purchased the audiobook of
Exit West by this author because, based on reviews, it's even better than this one and I'm anxious to find out. -
‘One morning Anders, a white man, woke up to find he had turned a deep and undeniable brown’
This is the first line of the book. This could have had so much complexity to it and much to be delved into. I must be missing something because I just don’t know where that was. It’s a very strange book.
It has short chapters, so come to Chaper 2 quickly. Oona his girlfriend answers the phone after finishing mediating, and is ‘in that fragile state of serenity that meditation can induce, the sense that one has briefly crested the wave of one’s thoughts, and would like to remain here, like one is now, …..” All that to say, she answered the phone.
These are the short vignettes of life. It is perilous when more people start changing skin color. Danger could occur. It is harder for some to accept the change then others. Anders loves Oona. He loves his Dad. She loves her mother. People in their lives have died prior to this. That was difficult. He likes to see Oona. I read the hardcover and then listened to this on audio. The book is narrated by the author in a soothing voice sounding poetic. Surely, I was not getting the bigger picture. It was coming………..….really soon.
There is no depth here. I think perhaps the message is that love prevails. I also think this is a pretentious joining of sentences to sound artsy and deep. I am reading the back of the book cover. This is about an extraordinary vision of human possibility. Another author promises a bighearted novel of ideas and most importantly limitless compassion. This is being compared to The Metamorphosis by Kafka and it will stay with me a long time after leaving the page. I read The Metamorphosis, 35 years ago and that book still is in my head. I just did not see that here. This book did not work for me. -
It’s one of those books that you sit and ponder what you’re gonna do with the rest of your life after reading it, realizing that you just need to sit there a bit longer.
On the edge of Octavia Butler’s (Kindred) essence - returns our beloved author of Exit West Mohsin Hamid. His newest and much anticipated novel doesn’t disappoint - invoking feelings of social, political, racial injustice & connection that he simply, and endearingly, throws in your lap.
Anders and Oona are characters you instantly have many feelings for, even if you’re just absorbing them while they adapt to their current lives.
I absolutely adore how much his multi-layered narrative positions them both to have pivotal, independent, and yet honed voices, while still illustrating how they’re magnetic forces toward one another.
Their parents are also massive figures in the story- their perceptions, relatable generational opinions, and legacies speak so broadly to readers of numerous ages.
I could go on about how the story involves potent emotional reaction it a perfectly briefed read, where each word matters.
Long story short… pre-order this book :)
Galley borrowed from the publisher. -
Shades of COVID: white people start turning brown-skinned. No one knows why. Racist armed vigilantes appear hunting people down – the police don’t do much about them. People stop going out, especially at night. Cell towers and power sometimes don’t work. Gunfire can be heard in the distance.
The story initially follows Anders, a young man, the first person as far as he knows, that this happened to. Maybe he’s just the first person in his town.
Anders works at a gym – not a family fitness center, but a place with an all-male heavy-duty weight-lifting clientele. We know what those guys will think.
Anders calls in sick for a few days. What will his woman-friend think? She’s been thinking about breaking up with him anyway. What will his father think? His father is a macho retired construction guy. So we know what he will think.
Little by little Anders goes back out into the world wearing big sunglasses, long pants, long-sleeved shirts and a hoodie. His boss grudgingly lets him come back to work. ‘I’d kill myself if it happened to me’ he tells Anders.
The story also follows Anders’ woman friend, Oona, and her mother. Oona teaches yoga. I liked this: “Teaching yoga had been what she did on the side, but on the side of what was never clear.”
Her mother is ill, watches TV all day and has been captured by the bizarre cult think on cable news and social media. The author tells us almost nothing about the bizarre things she believes. No need to because we all know. (The book was published in 2022.)
Oona’s mother feels that some kind of apocalyptic event has to happen – ‘a reckoning’ - so she takes the vigilante turmoil in stride. One day there’s a loud explosion and her mother seems almost elated to hear it. But then her daughter tells her it’s only thunder and the mother seems disappointed.
In the vigilante turmoil going on, mostly brown people but some white people are killed. Oona’s mother assumes that the brown people 'kill some of their own' just to throw suspicion on white people about who’s doing most of the killing. Can we believe people are brainwashed into thinking like this? Yes we can.
Hamid does a good job of showing us many of the nuances of skin color. For example, the shock of his gf’s mother when she sees his dark skin. Even his father has a hard time looking at him. As more and more people turn brown, Anders himself feels uneasy driving through his old neighborhood and seeing all these dark people. Anytime he meets someone Anders thinks: was he always dark or did ‘it’ happen to him too? He’s sometimes surprised to meet someone in person that he talked with on the phone who ‘didn’t sound dark.’
I think this book has great writing. It’s Saramago-style – long paragraphs with just commas as punctuation. Here’s a passage I liked when Anders and Oona are talking about their deceased parents (his mother and her father):
“She laughed and came closer to him, wrapping a leg around his, and she said she thought of dying a lot, not her dying, necessarily, just people dying, though her dying also, and he nodded, and he said when his mother was dying he had been certain she would not die, certain until he was not certain, and when he finally knew she was dying, was not sick but dying, he saw how much she wanted to live, until the pain took that from her, and she wanted to go, or did not want to go, but needed to go, needed to go even more than she wanted to stay, and he had not been ready for that, for his mother to need to leave, and it was a terrible thing to see.”
Is there a happy ending? Eventually A great story.
This is the first book of several I have read by this author (b. 1971) where the characters are not necessarily Muslims. I’ve read and reviewed Exit West, Moth Smoke and The Reluctant Fundamentalist. The author was born in Pakistan but lived in the US for several years as a child while his father attended Stanford. He returned for Princeton and Harvard and became a high-powered financial consultant for a while, later moving to London where he became a British citizen. Now he and his family divide their time among London, Lahore and New York.
Photo of the author from siena.edu -
Mr. Hamid really could have kept this in the drafts 🫤
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More than a century ago, Gregor Samsa woke from troubled dreams and found himself transformed into a monstrous insect.
Mohsin Hamid’s new novel, “The Last White Man,” buzzes with an ironic allusion to that unsettling metamorphosis. In the opening sentence, a White man named Anders awakens one morning to discover that his skin has turned “a deep and undeniable brown.” Following Kafka’s lead, the cause of this sudden alteration remains unknown; its meaning is equally elusive. What follows sometimes feels like a curious thought experiment — or Tucker Carlson’s worst nightmare, a racist fever dream of “the great replacement theory.”
Confronted in the groggy dawn hours with his altered appearance, Anders panics. His first instinct is to assume that someone else is in his bed. But no, he is the dark-skinned man he sees in his phone’s selfie. “He was overtaken by emotion,” Hamid writes, “not so much shock, or sorrow, though those things were there too, but above all the face replacing his filled him with anger, or rather. . . .
To read the rest of this review, go to The Washington Post:
https://www.washingtonpost.com/books/... -
This had its moments, and I've enjoyed a lot of Hamid's work, but I just don't know what this book is trying to say.
Maybe it's me but this felt muddled in its themes and weirdly I found it optimistic in a way that I had a hard time accepting. -
I have only read one other of Mohsin Hamid’s novels: Exit West, which I read 4.5 years ago when it was long listed for the Booker Prize. I found that to be a multi-layered book that I enjoyed more the further I got into it.
Unfortunately, my experience of this new book was rather the opposite. It is written in a very different style to Exit West and that is either going to work for you or it isn’t. But more about that in a bit.
When Anders wakes up one morning to discover that he has, overnight, gone from being a white man to being a dark-skinned man, he turns to an old friend, Oona. As other people start to have the same experience as Anders, the narrative skips between Anders to Oona. Anders’ father and Oona’s mother are also key figures as we see them as individuals and society as a whole reacting to this strange event that is unfolding around them. For some, it is frightening, for others it is liberating. It challenges perceptions:
”…maybe the fact that Anders no longer looked like Anders allowed her to see her relationship with him in another way, or maybe the fact that Anders remained Anders regardless of what he looked like allowed her to see the Anders in him more clearly.”
Some see these changes as something that has to be fought against and it isn’t long before there is violence on the streets. This is an area where the book did not work very well for me. There are numerous episodes where we hear about what is going on around our main characters and these external events occasionally impinge directly on their lives, but the way they are written brings no sense of danger or threat, no sense of unease. The focus remains on Anders and Oona (and their respective parents) as their relationship develops.
And I think a lot of this is down to the writing style here which will, I am sure, work really well for some readers and less well for others (like me). The book is written in paragraph-long sentences, often very long sentences. I’ve read quite a few books that take this kind of approach and it can work really well. At times, the writing here felt like it was aiming for Jon Fosse’s “slow prose” that I read a lot of fairly recently in his Septology. Except, for my tastes, it doesn’t quite get there and instead of creating a rhythm and a mood for the book, it becomes a distraction, especially in a book where such dramatic events are unfolding.
Ultimately, I felt that the story and the way that story was written were fighting against one another here. As I say, I am sure others will see the book entirely differently, but that is how it played out for me.
My thanks to the publisher for an ARC via NetGalley in exchange for an honest review. -
The Last White Man is the latest novel from Mohsin Hamid. I was a huge fan of his The Reluctant Fundamentalist, with its unique narrative voice, and Exit West, a Saramagoesque parable and positive take on economic migration, although less enamoured of How to Get Filthy Rich in Rising Asia (with a similarly distinctive narrative voice but less successful).
The Last White Man is, or promises to be, more in the Saramagoesque mould of Exit West, Kafka's Metamorphosis for the age of fearful white majorities who somehow feel they are the oppressed, and worrying that they may, in future, no longer be a majority (as per the plane flown over the recent Man City-Liverpool league game). The story opens:
One morning Anders, a white man, woke up to find he had turned a deep and undeniable brown. This dawned upon him gradually, and then suddenly, first as a sense as he reached for his phone that the early light was doing something strange to the color of his forearm, subsequently, and with a start, as a momentary conviction that there was somebody else in bed with him, male, darker, but this, terrifying though it was, was surely impossible, and he was reassured that the other moved as he moved, was in fact not a person, not a separate person, but was just him, Anders, causing a wave of relief, for if the idea that someone else was there was only imagined, then of course the notion that he had changed color was a trick too, an optical illusion, or a mental artifact, born in the slippery halfway place between dreams and wakefulness, except that by now he had his phone in his hands and he had reversed the camera, and he saw that the face looking back at him was not his at all.
And it is not just that his skin has darkened, but rather his physical appearance has changed completely, unrecognisable initially to his lover and father, albeit of a similar size, shape and strength and possessed of the same personality. The same person - but seen differently:
She told him what she thought, flat-out, that he looked like another person, not just another person, but a different kind of person, utterly different, and that anyone who saw him would think the same, and it was hard, but there it was.
Anders initially thinks his is an isolated case but gradually all of the white people in the (unnamed) city experience the same thing.
The author explained the motivation for the novel last year (
https://www.oprahdaily.com/entertainm...This sense that whiteness itself was worth thinking about from within, and my need to write this novel grew during the aughts, when I lived in London, encountering more of a threatened whiteness during the unease that morphed into Brexit.
I wanted to explore whiteness as honestly and sympathetically but also unsparingly and brutally as possible, as one might explore religiosity here in Pakistan, where there’s been a rise in intolerant discourse. I watch parallels between Muslim-majority societies and white-majority societies, and I participate in an acknowledgment of a sense of loss. I don’t regard whiteness as a monolithic thing. All of my characters are experiencing the loss of whiteness in different ways.
For this handful of characters, whiteness dies as a mutual participatory category.
But for me the novel was rather frustrating against this declared aim, the 'handful of characters' in the quote perhaps key. We see glimpses, 'noises off' almost, of what this change means for the wider society - vigilante white gangs looking to expel those who have changed from their homes, some impacted committing suicide
Anders’s boss had said he would have killed himself, and the following week a man in town did just that, his story followed by Anders in the local press, or rather online in the regional section of a large publication, the local paper having shut down long ago, this man shooting himself in front of his own house, a shooting heard but not seen by a neighbor, and called in, and assumed to be an act of home defense, the dark body lying there an intruder, shot with his own gun after a struggle, but the homeowner was not present, and was nowhere to be found, and then the wedding ring and the wallet and the phone on the dead man were all tallied up, and the messages that had been sent, and the experts weighed in, and the sum of it all was clear, in other words that a white man had indeed shot a dark man, but also that the dark man and the white man were the same. The mood in town was changing, more rapidly than its complexion.
But the focus is very much on Anders, his lover Oona, and on Anders' dying father and Oona's mother (at first rather on the side of the vigilantes) and their story is rather personal, with their 'loss of whiteness' seemingly something of a side show.
For example Oona, a yoga instructor, is mourning her brother (that I assumed "doing the molly" was some sort dance, and needed Google to inform me otherwise, perhaps explaining why I wasn't too interested in their story):
Oona remembered doing molly with her brother a few months post their father’s funeral, back when they were in high school, and they had done molly before, and her brother had not been so bad then, he was just one of those kids who liked to dabble in substances, somewhat regularly, and he had not yet found the substances that would hook him, and Oona had thought it might be too soon after their father to do the molly, and for her it had been, she had become miserable, but her brother had not, he had looked joyous, joyous but brittle, his joy both powerful and forced, like Oona’s mother’s was now, and it was possible that her brother’s brittleness that day had to do with his twin sister’s low, with having to manage her, but Oona thought not, she thought her brother had been brittle because he could not fully fool himself, because he was going to break, had already broken, like her mother had broken, and joy like that when you had broken, that kind of sudden, crazy joy, unearned, that was just a mask.
I would have liked to have seen much less of Oona and gym-bunny Anders and rather more of the wider storyline.
One thing I did appreciate was the positive close to the book. At the time of Exit West, Hamid commented that "part of the great political crisis we face in the world today is a failure to imagine plausible desirable futures. We are surrounded by nostalgic visions, violently nostalgic visions" and as with that novel he shows how the ending of white majority is a positive thing, even for those previously in that majority, this from when Oona reflects on the own change, realising that no one is defined only by who they are now:
Oona did not know where it came from, but a feeling of melancholy touched her then, a sadness at the losing of something, and perhaps it was her attachment to the old Oona she was mourning, to the face she had known and the person she had been, the person she had lived within and appeared as, or if it was not that, then perhaps it was an attachment to certain memories that she had evoked in herself, to memories she presently wondered whether she would continue to evoke, an attachment to a person connected to that person who had been a little girl once, and who had not yet lost her father and her brother, and who had not yet had to struggle to keep from losing her mother, but of course the people she had been previously themselves looked different, they looked different from how she, Oona, had looked only yesterday, she had changed before she had changed, she had changed every decade and every year and every day, and so she thought there was no reason that she must lose her memories, the ones she wished to keep.
3 stars
Thanks to the publisher via Netgalley for the ARC -
Interesting premise…. Our white protagonist wakes up to find out his skin has turned dark…
The book opens with Anders, who is a white man, waking up to find his skin has turned dark. He is in shock and not sure how to process this. He finally reveals it to a girl he was dating and weeks later, news report starts popping up of white people turning dark. There’s an undercurrent of dread, tension and what is next. Soon his girlfriend, Oona turns dark and they have to decide how to move forward.
Honestly, this is truly a strong premise. This book reminds me a lot of Leave The World Behind
the writing and undercurrent of something is about to pop off was constantly there. I’m not sure I got the key take away from the book or what the book was hoping to achieve but I am still thinking about it a lot after finishing it weeks ago. -
An important and great book thematically, but I had some trouble with the style. The long sentences reminded me a bit of Jon Fosse, but whereas in Fosse I found it beautiful and mesmerising, here it didn’t really work for me. I got easily distracted and sometimes found it hard to feel involved.
Thank you Hamish Hamilton for the ARC. -
Mohsin Hamid's latest novel, The Last White Man, is powerful, thought-provoking, and so timely.
“One morning Anders, a white man, woke up to find he had turned a deep and undeniable brown.”
So begins the latest book by the author of Exit West, a book I absolutely loved. Anders doesn’t understand what happened to him, and for a while he can hardly believe he is the person looking back at him in the mirror. He feels totally different and feels everyone is judging him differently (although that could just be his paranoia).
He keeps his secret from everyone around him except Oona, an old friend with whom he’s recently become much closer. But as the same phenomenon starts occurring to many others, people wonder what could be causing this and what it means.
This is a fascinating story, with a walk-a-mile-in-my-shoes feel, and it’s tremendously thought-provoking. How often do we feel like strangers in our own skin when nothing has changed, so this is pretty profound.
I wanted a bit more from the book, but I honestly just love the way Hamid writes and captures both emotion and the zeitgeist of the moment. This would definitely be a great book for book club discussion.
See all of my reviews at
itseithersadnessoreuphoria.blogspot.com.
Follow me on Instagram at
https://www.instagram.com/the.bookishworld.of.yrralh/. -
Racist garbage
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I came to this book after listening to an evocative and smart interview with Hamid on The Ezra Klein podcast. There were things I admired in TLWM--the premise, for one, which seems to stem in part from how the author, (a light skinned POC with a"Muslim-sounding" last name, as he describes it), experienced the quick loss of his honorary white-ish status after 911. What's more, I enjoyed the spareness of the story, as well as the exploration of all kinds of grief, and finally the long, clause-y sentences--though I occasionally ached for variety in that form choice. I ached for more variety too, in how Hamid characterized this magical loss of whiteness. I was down to imagine how these characters felt internal and external alienation, especially to start, but I wanted to see their experience of "darkness" go from there---and not *only* toward despair, or tepid acceptance, but maybe also toward new, unimagined freedoms or community or something. Finally, I would have loved to hear more from the already Black characters who must also inhabit this fictional town (aside for one lone character). How did they feel about witnessing this form of "whiteness" disappearing, as individuals and in community with one another? How were their lives change, too? What other hierarchies could be seem glimmering in wait? I'm definitely interested in reading more by Hamid: what an interesting mind!
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When I started reading this I had the feeling it was gonna be a 3-star for me. Initially the concept didn’t seem entirely original and it took me a little while to get into Hamid’s style of prose.
However once I got into the rhythm, and then of course more engaged, it became apparent that this book is about so much more that it appears on the surface.
There’s the obvious race theme, for sure, but I think that’s also a device to look so much deeper into morality, dealing with loss and coping with change.
It’s an ambitious book with some really beautiful writing and concepts. -
3.5*
Labai vykęs trumputis (3 val.) romanas rasizmo tema. Greičiau apysaka.
Pradedant nuo pagrindinio veikėjo žmonėms per naktį pasikeičia odos spalva. Iš šviesios tampa tamsia. Paprastas sumanymas, paprastas išpildymas, bet toks, mano galva, labai taiklus pabandymas apauti skaitytoją kitų batais. Ir dar labai subtiliai apie fanatizmą. -
This feels like something I’d like a lot more on the page, potentially. Out loud, the style has a grating habit where it constantly reiterates information it just mentioned; presumably for the musicality/cadence of the prose. Sort of like, maybe, Elizabeth Strout’s Lucy Barton. Whereas I find her endearing and fitting, this one-size fits all to every characters from a macro perspective is really annoying. To the point where I didn’t care all that much what was going on, because I would get into it and then be jarred right out of it. If it wasn’t a 2 hour audiobook I’d have stopped. Not for me, unfortunately.
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Not sure what to make of this book honestly.
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Di Mohsin Hamid avevo letto nel 2017 Exit West (
https://www.goodreads.com/review/show...) e mi era piaciuto molto.
Ne L’ultimo uomo bianco, la narrazione si sviluppa di nuovo attorno una coppia di protagonisti, Anders e Oona, che vivono, come i protagonisti di Exit West, in una città indefinita.
Mohsin Hamid affronta il tema del razzismo cambiando le carte in tavola: immagina che in questa città indefinita gli uomini, da un momento all’altro, si ritrovano con il colore della pelle cambiata, da bianco a marrone scuro.
La prima difficoltà è quella di riconoscersi: come si possono riconoscere i volti noti adesso che il colore della pelle è diverso?
Un altro tema affrontato in questo romanzo è quello dell’abbandono e del lutto:
“Lei disse che suo padre se n’era andato senza preavviso, una cosa insensata, non c’era altra parola, prima c’era e dopo se n’era andato, e la cosa le aveva fatto pensare che sotto ognuno di noi c’è una botola, una botola che si può aprire in qualunque istante, come se camminassimo su un ponte di corde e assi che ondeggia alto sopra un canyon, e alcune assi sono marce, e tu fai un passo normale e scopri di aver messo il piede nel nulla, senza aver neppure sentito lo strappo, e questa consapevolezza dovrebbe renderti piú prudente, farti procedere con passo piú lieve, ma per suo fratello non era stato cosí, lui su quelle assi aveva pestato i piedi, sempre piú forte, come se gli andasse benissimo se anche si rompevano, come se una parte di lui volesse andarsene, cosí come aveva voluto andarsene la madre di Anders, ma senza il dolore, anzi, non senza il dolore, ma senza quel tipo di dolore, senza il cancro, ma con un grande struggimento per come l’universo l’aveva deluso, per come si era rivelato un tipo di universo che lui non poteva amare, un universo che ci tradiva, tutti noi, e cosí lui aveva deciso di andarsene, anzi, non deciso, non era stata una decisione, era stata una direzione, un mutamento di direzione, e lei se n’era accorta molto presto, e aveva cercato di ignorare la cosa, aveva anche cercato di fare quel che poteva per riportarlo indietro, ma lui ormai si era avviato, e non c’era modo di trattenerlo, e alla fine aveva fatto quel che aveva fatto, e se n’era andato quando se n’era andato, molto presto, perché tutti ce ne andiamo e lui se ne rendeva conto con piú chiarezza degli altri, e non era cosí insensibile da pensare che valesse la pena sforzarsi di restare.”
Come si può vedere dalla citazione che ho riportato, in questo romanzo ci sono periodi molto lunghi; e nonostante la lunghezza, essi sono al tempo stesso così lirici e densi di significato.
Anche in questo romanzo, Mohsin Hamid dà un taglio ottimistico all’evoluzione dei suoi protagonisti: mostra come è possibile per Anders e Oona abbracciare il proprio passato e la loro iniziale identità, mentre piano piano imparano ad accettare la nuova versione di sé stessi, che è anche più inclusiva
“Gli anni passarono veloci per Anders e Oona, sempre piú veloci, come capita a tutti noi, e i ricordi dell’antica bianchezza si allontanavano ma persistevano anche, e quando nacque la loro figlia, una bambina piccola e tosta in un corpo piccolo e gracile che presto divenne lungo e snello, con un’espressione di muta ferocia nello sguardo e una scarsa propensione agli abbracci, sebbene capace ogni tanto di parole di una tenerezza che mozzava il fiato, mozzava il fiato per quanto era diretta, e rara, un ti voglio bene detto con un’occhiata fulminante, come quella di un’adulta, detto, sí, quasi come un’accusa, quando arrivò la loro figlia, e poi, in fretta, troppo in fretta, diventò una donna, vollero trasmetterle alcune cose del passato, quello che era il suo retaggio, e allora le parlarono della loro bianchezza, e di quel che era accaduto, e del padre di Anders, tanto simile a lei, estremamente diverso ma anche tanto simile a lei, e della madre di Anders, l’insegnante, e del padre di Oona, e del fratello di Oona, di tutti loro, i suoi avi, le persone da cui discendeva, e lei ascoltò, era disposta ad ascoltare, ma in modo pacato, senza fare domande, e i suoi genitori non riuscirono mai a capire quanto lei, o chiunque altro dei giovani, comprendesse davvero.” -
Sure. This is what hate against a certain race looks like. You think this is acceptable?
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Written over a century after Gregor Samsa's terrifying transformation came to fore, The Last White Man offers a contemporising take on Kafka's existentialist classic:
One morning, Anders, a white man, woke up to find he had turned a deep and undeniable brown.
At first, Anders calls in sick to work, shuts himself in, and avoids everyone he knows, willing his newfound melanin to fade away as quickly as it came. But his metamorphosis is not an isolated incident, and soon enough pale folks all over are turning dark. Racial panic seizes the collective imagination as the supposedly stable ideas of race and identity are overturned: what was certain is no longer, tensions overflow into the streets, and riots ensue.
Instead of plunging us headfirst into this world consumed and immobilised by what was once an impossible change, Mohsin Hamid focuses our attention on two characters whose personal griefs place them at a sort of distance from the chaos unfolding around and inside them. Writing with the unadorned lucidity of a parable, he explores the coming together of Anders and Oona, the former is grappling with the changes in his self-identity, the loss of recognition from those known and dear to him ("I would have killed myself," his boss says to him, while his once robust father slowly diminishes before his eyes), and the danger that has descended on him so suddenly and overwhelmingly; the latter still tending to the fresh wound of losing her twin brother while watching her mother sink deep into internet disinformation (both mother and daughter are looking out for what seems imminent: one awaits a reckoning to deliver them from these 'attacks' on their race, the other curious, even hungry, for the change).
Together, these characters play a part in ushering in an uneasy future so entirely unlike the past, circling the questions of race and mortality, of loss, and of endings that foretell new beginnings. A new beginning it is, for towards the end their town is entirely browned, Anders' father—the titular last white man—is in his grave, and a child is born of a colour her parents hadn't started out with.
However, while constructed with care and characteristic wit, this brave new world seemingly comes together too easily, is far too brave. While racism is, in reality, more than skin deep, it is erased here far too easily, with its attendant questions of class, nationality, language, and internalisation left largely unprobed. Given that this comes from a Pakistani writer who has thus far attempted to spotlight such issues through his writing, it is important to keep in mind that The Last White Man is a project that began, in Hamid's words to
Oprah Daily, with "the sense that whiteness itself was worth thinking about from within." Indeed, when read like this the book's lack of voice and visibility to how whiteness affects and is perceived by those who have always been without seems deliberate. It implies that as far as whiteness is concerned, its ramifications can be understood by the once-white man only when he sheds his privilege and attempts to confront the realities it creates. This seems evident if we consider the one scene, fleeting if not for the run-on prose, where the now-brown Anders finds himself in dialogue with the ethnically brown cleaner at the gym he works at, and proposes to train him."the cleaning guy looked at Anders and said, no, and then he added, less abruptly, and not with a smile, or not with a smile on his lips, although perhaps with one in his eyes, it was difficult to tell, honestly it could have been the opposite of a smile, and with that peculiar expression, the cleaning guy added, what I would like is a raise.
Subtlety, then, is the author's mode in this thought-provoking novel, and it could perhaps work as a gateway to deeper confrontations with the issues of racial injustice and racist insecurity. While it may not be everything one would expect it to be, it certainly is well-written, an allegory well-suited for our times. -
4.5
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First, I must mention that I won this ARC through a Goodreads giveaway from Riverhead Books, an imprint of Penguin Random House, L.L.C. I was terribly excited to win a book as I have been entering Goodreads giveaways since 2009, the year I began using Goodreads to keep track of the books I read and want to read. Also, I must add that Mohsin Hamid wrote a one page letter to the reader, explaining his motivation for writing this book, and I hope it’s included in the final version of this book because it adds to the reading experience tremendously.
Mohsin Hamid’s “The Last White Man,” is a relevant and poignant story that feels like reading the stream of consciousness directly from his mind. The story begins with Anders, the main character, waking up to realize his skin tone has changed from white to brown. The story brilliantly shows how changing the color of one’s skin changes literally everything in one’s life, from work to brushing your teeth to kissing your gf. Everything in Anders’ life is affected by the skin color change. Mr. Hamid weaves the story in such a way no one is ever judging but rather observing the changes. Most readers will guess that based on the title, there will be one white man left standing by the end of the book, but the real story, in my opinion, is about being seen. Who sees YOU, is based only on what is observed or seen from the outside, and how as humans we judge others by what is seen on the surface, the outside. Simple, yet how true it is to put it to the test by changing the dynamic until there is only one white man left standing? I encourage all readers to read this book as it may change the way you think about how you see colors. -
Featuring a Kafkaesque metamorphosis, white people’s skin turns brown overnight in Hamid’s latest work. Manifesting the racist fear of ‘great replacement’ theory in a literal sense, Hamid’s book ultimately felt a little simplistic and slight (it’s novella length). I think Brit Bennett and Maurice Carlos Ruffin were able to do a lot more with exploring race through skin colour in their most recent works. I wanted more on a narrative level but I really enjoyed Hamid’s paragraph-long sentences where clause after clause is organised together somewhat breathlessly. At a sentence level, this book is a feat of clause engineering. These are the hardest working commas you’ll find in fiction. Hamid set himself a difficult technical challenge and I suspect writing teachers will assign this book in class for that very reason.
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Interesting story, great writing, but I felt like it drifted in a way that was unsatisfying to me.
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I enjoyed Mohsin Hamid’s last novel Exit West and was soon reminded of the author’s style and tone as I (quickly) made my way into The Last White Man. I find Hamid has a (not unpleasant) ethereal quality in his writing in which the reader soon learns that its not helpful to read things too literally.
This latest novel has been summarised by all and sundry as a novel about race, and with a huge nod in the direction of Kafka’s Metamorphosis . It’s easy to see why, and the central conceit- that a person might change skin colour, with huge consequences, while not an entirely original concept, is nonetheless a dominating and thought provoking premise.
It was only when I read the book a second time, and determined not to focus on race, and to take race out of human relations that I found I got something new and meaningful from the book.
It’s a book about mortality; the passing of a baton to the next generation, and of dying a dignified, and ‘good’, death.
I don’t think it’s the best book I will read this year and I think there is a limit to how much Hamid can pare down his novels, but as a brief filler between weightier novels it ahs enough to keep the reader occupied, and hopefully to contemplate a message that will remain in the memory.
Mohsin Hamid in conversation with Jo Hanya at LRB Bookshop. 09.08.2022
• Book is about loss. Loss of colour; loss of people, loss of human decency
• Daughter represents the beginning of something after the loss
• The book does not feature black people (one very brief cameo excepted). This is deliberate and shies away from presenting the reader with good, and not good people. The reader has to make these judgements; the book characters will not do so for the reader. If its read as a critique of racism, it will disappoint.
• Anders’s father. It’s the last gunfight; its about dying.
• Anders role is that of an ancestor passing on something rather than as a member of a tribe.
• The world today: lots of us feel like we are losing things. The anxiety that my group needs defending is dangerous.
• What is a good death? Duty to the young. Coming together is important, but race coming together is not important.
• Form. Long sentences. A means to foster reader thoughts. In the same sentence something is said, then thought about, then the reader starts to realise what they think before they move on to the next idea. Novel is different to non-fiction. The novelist gives you half the book; the reader makes it whole. Playing make-believe.
• Punctuation is about pauses. A comma is forward looking. A full stop is just that.
• Toni Morrison. Tutored Hamid as a university student thirty years ago.
o She was great at reading out loud. Could make virtually anything sound interesting. Read with your ears.
o Importance of form. Morrison stressed formal rigour. Hamid regards himself as a formalist trying to push his form.
