An elegiac portrait of a foundation-less family written by the 2021 winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature.
The book opens with Abbas having some sort of seizure and being cared for by his wife, Maryam. As his illness progresses we learn about his early life growing up in Africa and how he comes to be living in Norwich; we learn of Maryam's life, born a foundling, and we also find out about the lives of their now-geown-up children Hanna and Jamal. And we start to discover answers to the two great mysteries: why Abbas left Africa and why Maryam fled from her Vijay and Ferooz.
The book is written in the third-person, head-hopping between the PoV of the four members of the family. There are times when it seems to meander, with long paragraphs, but this is life in all its messiness, not neatly tied up like a novel, and its purpose is to make you understand this family.
But it is structured. The big revelation from Abbas comes almost exactly at the half-way mark.
Selected quotes:
- "The longer he lived, the nearer his childhood drew to him, and it seemed less and less like a distant fantasy of someone else's life." (C 1)
- "That was the thing about growing old together, you shuffled and made space and learned to be comfortable with each other, if you were lucky." (C 1)
- "Is this what parents do, she wondered, study their children as they turn into men and women they learn to grow cautious of?" (C 1)
- "Ba's silences were sometimes dark and his solitariness has a feeling of menace, as if he had gone somewhere where it would not be pleasant to meet him." (C 1)
- "Allah karim, he said is any of their neighbours asked to borrow money for some emergency. God is generous. Ask him for a loan, not me." (C 1)
- "Perhaps it was like that for many people, ducking and weaving through life, wincing as glancing blows landed now and then and putting up a ragged rearguard against a strengthening adversary." (C 1)
- "How their teachers loved that deep submissive silence. But they could not make that silence endure. They could not quite keep the children in check. Something always happened, some small insurrection, irrepressible laughter, an undaunted boy whose cheek could not be suppressed." (C 1)
- "For millions of people, moving is a moment of ruin and failure, a defeat that is no longer avoidable, a desperate flight, going from bad to worse, from home to homelessness, from citizen to refugee, from living a tolerable or even contented life to vile horror." (C 2)
- "Perhaps that was what happened to everyone, and they all learned to swallow what hurt they felt as their children tired of them." (C 2)
- "The paintwork was peeling and its beams and bannisters leaned slightly from age and fatigue. Its dereliction was malign, watchful, accusing." (C 2)
- "There was a library, with hundreds of books he could take home to read if he wished. It was like all his schooling until then had taken place in a small room, a small empty shut-away room. Then someone had opened the door and he found out that the room was a tiny cell in a huge building." (C 2)
- "She thought that in times of trouble Beverley would be a denouncer." (C 3)
- "Who did it belong to, the flat cap? To the working man or to the landed gentry? He had seen pictures of it on both their heads." (C 3)
- "There were people who just knew how to do that, just take what they wanted, or at least take what they could." (C 4)
- "I am still here, like a tiresome guest in my own life." (C 5)
- "Madness is a cataclysm, an act of nature whose meaning is explicable only to itself, because it serves neither human nor divine purpose." (C 5)
A very readable book with moments of wisdom as Gurnah reflects on rootlessness and family life in beautiful and elegant prose.
December 2021; 279 pages
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