Ongaro Alessia
CLASSE: 5ALS

TASK
Read the article to identify the journalist’s judgement and opinions about EXIT WEST and say if you agree with him or not. Support your considerations with reference to your reading experience.

Structure to be followed in your production
Explain the objective of your written work
Make reference to the review and the text titles
List the journalist’s judgement and opinions
Develop yoour argumentation/s point by point
Draw your conclusion.

In the present text I’m going to explain the journalist’s judgement and opinions about Exit West and develop and support my considerations.

The article’s title is explicit because the journalist give the reader the purpose of his article: he wants to make a review of Exit West by Mohsin Hamid. Moreover, through the word “tale”, the reader can understand the literary genre of the book: it is a tale, a story created using the imagination. Another keyword in the title is “parable” that underlines the style of the novel: it is a short story that teaches a moral and spiritual lesson.

Right from the start of the review, the journalist makes some considerations.
Firstly he analyses the tone and the kind of voice, and he says that “Exit West confidently adopts yet another kind of voice, a tone of radical simplicity that in the opening 50-odd pages borders on brutality and makes every considerations, every detail, every scene feel at once vital and under threat”.
Secondly he focuses his attention on the clarity of the story, indeed he writes: “the mixture of restraint in such passages is very impressive”.
Thirdly he analyses the narrative, because he says that it “depends on clear storytelling so much for its effect, and Hamid makes this clarity a means of generating suspense”.
Finally he studies the point of the novel: he says that Hamid “is deely engaged with the most issues of our time”, in particular with problems regarding “national identity and social cohesion”.

In my opinion the considerations of the novelist are right, so I’m agree with him. The tone of the novel is simple, because the narrator chooses easy words and because he includes a lot of details in the narration and this semplicity tone makes the story clear and easy. The novel is also interesting because it explains one of the main problems of our time: the eproblem of the emigration, that the narrator tells indirectly, through the “travel” of the two protagonists.

In conclusion, in my opinion the article is effective because it explains the main features of the novel Exit West.