Book Review
The Last White Man – An unnerving parable of racism is short and sharp
Mohsin Hamid’s 180-page tale of what happens to white people when they have their racial appearance altered overnight will stay with the reader for a long time
“One morning Anders, a white man, woke up to find he had turned a deep and undeniable brown.” As first lines go, this one from The Last White Man is wonderfully understated and simultaneously shocking, echoing the lead sentence in Franz Kafka’s Metamorphosis. Like Kafka’s masterpiece, Mohsin Hamid’s book is also extremely brief, its 180 pages more like a novella than a fully-fledged novel. And yet, much happens over the course of its 16 chapters.
