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.