Hamid, Mohsin: The Last White Man

This was an interesting piece of speculative fiction set in an unspecified English town where over the course of several weeks white people turn dark overnight and thus wake up to entirely new realities of life.I very much liked the Kafkaeske beginning and the general premise of the story, which the author develops rather cunningly. However, the tension that is generated in the first part of this book does not get an adequate outlet and instead slowly evaporates over the course of the remaining chapters, which made the second half of this novella feel considerably weaker and less meaningful than the first.Furthermore, the writing style was rather dull and repetitive, which at some points fits the narrative very well but at others is just annoying and makes it hard to push through.

"The last white man" is quite a short book. It is a parabola which reminded me of the stories of Franz Kafka or the "city of blinds" by Jose Saramago. Telling a story with a symbolic meaning. Reading this book was not always easy because of the repetitive style and the long sentences without punctuation. I am not a fan of these long sentences. Sometimes I had to read the sentence again to remember the beginning of the sentence. The plot itself is really interesting, but I could not get warm with the protagonists Anders and Jona. Funny that "Anders" means "different" in German- that is surely no coincidence. I missed more insights into the emotions of the characters, I could nit get a grip of them. Also, I would like to know more about the consequences if there would be no white people anymore. Would this also mean less racism and more equal pay? The author has left many questions unanswered, leaving me behind with a lot of question marks.