The Markaz Review:

Philip Grant

Nobel laureate Abdulrazak Gurnah’s new novel is a grand exploration of life in Tanzania, his writing unmistakably of our moment, on immigration and the fate of the formerly colonized long after decolonization.

Abdulrazak Gurnah is a novelist of plausibility; of looking back; of coming and going. Of plausibility, because in his works we are as far away from any magical realistic sensibility as could be. The authorial voice is always steady and trustworthy — perhaps a little too so: a dash of self-doubt or wry self-undermining would not go amiss. Gurnah almost always writes in the third person, 1987’s Memory of Departure with its extensive first-person passages being a striking exception. We scarcely doubt that we might meet his characters in Zanzibar or southern England and that they would walk, talk, think, feel, and generally have lives rather like the ones he recounts. Even if Raya in his latest novel, Theft, believed her father’s stories of talking animals were true as a child, and struggles to “shake off their reality” as an adult, there is never any sense in Gurnah’s work that speaking beasts or jinns or ghouls might break the bounds of their storytelling enclosures and become themselves characters in the novel.

Of looking back, because here is an oeuvre (eleven novels now and inshallah counting) where readers are inevitably taken back with the author to Zanzibar, the country Gurnah left for the United Kingdom as a refugee in 1968. The violence of Zanzibari independence, revolution, and union with Tanganyika to form the United Republic of Tanzania haunts many of his books, and this upheaval led many Zanzibaris of Arab origin (like Gurnah himself, whose ancestors hailed from Yemen) as well as other groups like Indians to leave for elsewhere. 

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