Starred review from October 21, 2024
Two Tanzanian men, abandoned as boys, forge their own paths in this incisive novel by Nobel Prize winner Gurnah (Afterlives). Karim’s Muslim parents divorce when he is a boy. His mother, Raya, feels no affection for him, and abandons him to her father after falling in love with a man named Haji Othman. Years later, Badar, a 10-year-old orphan boy, enters the Othman household as a domestic servant for Raya, who’s now married to Haji. As the novel unfolds, Badar is revealed to be Haji’s nephew, cast off by his wayward brother and hated by Baba, the household’s elderly and devout patriarch. Karim becomes aware of Badar’s plight during a visit home from university, when Badar is 15. Two years later, when Baba suspects Badar of stealing groceries on the family’s credit, he instructs Haji to banish the teenager. Badar goes to live with Karim, now a married low-level bureaucrat in Zanzibar, and both men rise through the ranks of their respective fields, with Badar’s hotel busboy job leading to an assistant manager position and Karim on track to become a government minister. By the novel’s end, their series of cosmopolitan encounters have driven one to abandon his Tanzanian identity and the other to reinvest in it. Written in lucid prose, Gurnah’s tale is at once culturally specific and emotionally universal, especially in depicting Badar’s heartache as a boy and the strangeness of his arrangement with the Othman household as seen from Karim’s point of view. Gurnah is at the top of his game. Agent: Peter Strauss, RCW Literary.
February 1, 2025
Nobel Prize winner Gurnah (Afterlives) returns with a story about three people coming of age in Tanzania during a period of global change when even a sleepy, quiet spot on the map can become a place of tourism and startling changes. Prepub Alert.
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Starred review from January 15, 2025
Nobel Prize-winning novelist Gurnah delivers a story whose title reverberates throughout. Raya is a beauty who, having caught the eye of a revolutionary soldier in the colonial Tanzania of the early 1960s, is instead married off quickly to an older man whom she does not love and who "was relentless in his demand for her body." She finally leaves him, taking her 3-year-old son, Karim, with her. He is mostly an afterthought; as Gurnah writes, somberly, "Karim's mother treated him like a possession she was fond of but the details of whose welfare she was happy to leave to her parents." Finding new love, she leaves Karim with them; only two years later is he invited to visit her in her new home in Dar es Salaam. Without much ambition, he finally moves in with Raya and her husband, Haji, to attend university, a household arrangement augmented by the arrival of a young man, Badar, a villager who, though a kinsman of Haji's, is treated as a servant. Badar is uncomplaining, though he harbors a hatred for the father who abandoned him: "He could not remember when he started to think of him as a shithead," but the feeling runs deep. An accusation of theft shatters the uneasy peace of the household, unfounded though it is; it will not be the first time that Badar comes under suspicion, although it is the late-blossoming and suddenly career-minded Karim who abuses Badar's trust--and that's just the start of it. No word is wasted as Gurnah steadily subverts the good will he has built for Karim and reveals Badar to be less passive than he appears. Unexpectedly, the story even has a happy ending, if only for Badar--and given the trials he's put through by hapless Western tourists, arrogant aid workers, and his own family, that's a relief. A tightly constructed family drama with surprising complications.
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February 1, 2025
The bonds of family, friends, and workers are tested in this coming-of-age tale about three young people. Beautiful Fauzia is magnetically drawn to the handsome, suave Karim who comes from a well-to-do family. Badar is an uneducated domestic worker in Karim's household; his family severely neglected him. Fauzia teaches Badar how to cook and clean the house, and he proves capable until he is falsely accused of theft. This accusation changes his life, but Karim gets him a job at the Tamarind Hotel. At the hotel, Badar meets an attractive woman, a guest who invites him out to dinner. When Badar declines, Karim steps in and takes the guest to one of his favorite restaurants. This begins an affair, another pivotal moment that leads to abrupt changes in the lives of the novel's three protagonists. VERDICT Nobel Prize winner Gurnah (emeritus, English and postcolonial literatures, Univ. of Kent; Afterlives) is a captivating, enthralling storyteller whose characters are vibrant and sympathetic. The pages fly by quickly in his wonderful new novel.--Lisa Rohrbaugh
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