If you’re new to the work of Abdulrazak Gurnah, you’re in for a treat. There are 11 novels to enjoy, including Theft, the first to be published since his Nobel Prize in 2021. Gurnah was born in Zanzibar but he has lived in England from the age of 18, and his books are mainly set between Europe and East Africa.
Theft is about three friends, Karim, Fauzia and Badar, growing up in Zanzibar in the 1990s. Karim’s mother escapes from an unhappy marriage, then leaves for Dar es Salaam on the mainland to live with her new lover, leaving three year-old Karim to be raised by his grandmother. Further changes of household follow, but despite sometimes challenging circumstances, he’s never really in doubt of a roof over his head. He attends university, progresses at work, marries Fauzia, and a comfortable life ahead seems assured.
[ Abdulrazak Gurnah: ‘Nobel Prize made me think more kindly about my body of work’Opens in new window ]
Badar, on the other hand, is less fortunate. His mother died when he was a baby and his father, a quarrelsome, troublesome man, disappeared to Mombasa, leaving him in the care of distant relatives. “We did the best we could for you, and may god reward us,” they tell him. Without warning, he’s deposited at Karim’s family’s house to work as a houseboy – unpaid, unthanked, forever dependent on the supposed generosity of people more fortunate than himself. From these troubled beginnings, he must learn to make a life, in servitude, deference and watchfulness.
Gurnah has written elsewhere about the musim, the monsoon winds that carry traders’ ships across the Indian Ocean to the eastern coast, bringing and taking away spices, jewels, songs, prayers, slaves and stories. These ever-repeating cycles of arrival and departure, of excitement and quiet, of bringing and taking away, are part of the texture of life in his novels.
If Gurnah went relatively unrecognised before the Nobel, perhaps it was because he doesn’t follow the well-recognised paradigm of a man with a goal of taking on the world: rather, his characters are often powerless people, tossed about like scraps of wood on the surface of the ocean, or swept far from home by forces beyond their control. Perhaps, as for Badar, the heroic achievement is simply to endure. Another glittering tapestry of a novel from a master storyteller of our times.
