"The Last Gift" by Abdulrazak Gurnah

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

This review was written by the author of Motherdarling  and The Kids of God

Books by Nobel Laureates reviewed in this blog:

Abdulrazak Gumah (2021)

The Last Gift
Gravel Heart 
Afterlives

Kazuo Ishiguro (2017)

Klara and the Sun

The Buried Giant

When We Were Orphans

Patrick Modiano (2014)

In the Cafe of Lost Youth

The Black Notebook

Alice Munro (2013)

The View from Castle Rock

Herta Muller (2009)

The Passport

Doris Lessing (2007)

The Golden Notebook

The Fifth Child

Ben, in the World

Gabriel Garcia Marquez (1992)

Chronicle of a Death Foretold

Saul Bellow (1976)

The Victim

Heinrich Boll (1972)

The Train was on Time

Samuel Beckett (1969)

The Expelled; The Calmative;, The End & First Love

Waiting for Godot

John Steinbeck (1962)

Of Mice and Men

Cannery Row

Albert Camus (1957)

The Plague

The Outsider

The Myth of Sisyphus

The Fall

William Faulkner (1949)

Sanctuary

As I Lay Dying

Andre Gide (1947)

The Immoralist

Strait is the Gate

The Vatican Cellars

Hermann Hesse (1946)

Steppenwolf

Demian

Thomas Mann (1929)

Death in Venice

"American Dirt" by Jeanine Cummins

 The book starts when eight year old Luca hears bullets, the sound of gunmen belonging to one of the drug-trafficking cartels in Acapulco murdering his entire family except for him and his Mum, Lydia, who manage to hide. 

Then Lydia and Luca, still in shock from the grief of their bereavement, are on the run from the cartel. It is difficult even getting out of the state. They can't fly - Luca has no id and neither of them had time to collect a passport - and they can't use cash machines, mobile phones or anything that might be traced. Mexico has no long distance passenger trains so they hitch illegal rides on freight trains with migrants from other central and south american countries. They join the long procession of migrants.

There are some good people who spontaneously help, feed, shelter and protect them. There is danger everywhere. The police, especially the migrant police, are corrupt and some of them are likely to be in the pay of the cartels. They join other migrants, all heading for the desert border with the US.

Every step of this appalling journey is brilliantly chronicled.

• "Luca's eyes feel like sandpaper and he still can't find a way to loosen the joints of his body, but at least he's breathing again." (Ch 5)
• "Her expression is one Luca has never seen before, and he fears it might be permanent. It's as if seven fishermen have cast their hooks into her from different directions and they're all pulling at once." (Ch 5)
• "Newton's Third Law can resonate in a place like this: for every wickedness there is an equal and opposite possibility of redemption." (Ch 32)

One of the tensest books I have read in a long time. Two characters with whom one cannot not empathise. Gritty reality. Every moment there is the possibility of disaster. This is hugely emotionally involving. A gripping read. The pacing is perfect. A quarter of the way through Lydia learns about La Bestia, the freight trains that can take her and Luca to the border, if they can survive the incredible dangers involved with the ride. Exactly half way through, Lydia discovers the true motive for the cartel boss's murderous assault on her family. And exactly three-quarters of the way through the encounter the people smuggler. You can't get more perfect pacing than that,

This review was written by the author of Motherdarling  and The Kids of God

"Hearts and Minds" by Amanda Craig

The tales of five Londoners, told in the present tense, are interwoven. There's a murder at the start but this is not a murder mystery. There is an act of terrorism near the end but this is not a thriller. And, at the end, the tales are mostly unresolved. It's difficult to classify. I suppose it is a novel about London, with a particular focus on the experiences of the immigrants who make the city function: the cleaners and the cab drivers, the prostitutes and the teachers.

The characters are:

• Polly, an immigration lawyer of Jewish descent, whose au pair is an illegal Russian who has disappeared
• Ian, from South Africa, a teacher in a sink comprehensive. 
• Job, an illegal immigrant from Zimbabwe, working as a minicab driver and car washer.
• Anna, an illegal immigrant from the Ukraine, trafficked into prostitution.
• Katie, escaping an unfaithful but rich fiance in America, working as an editorial assistant for a small magazine.

It was an interesting read with a lot of information about the different experiences. But I only really got inside the head of Job, the others seemed slightly formulaic as was the school that Ian taught in and the portrayal of the Moslems. There were no real surprises. I guessed what had happened to Iryna almost from the start and the ending was fairly obvious from early on. There was some fun in spotting the little links that bound the characters together but those connections were not psychologically strong. 

A much more emotionally engaging book about the immigrant experience is The Road Home by Rose Tremain.

Some great moments:

• "At night, even in these dead months of the year, the city is never wholly dark. Its shadows twitch with a harsh orange light that glows and fades, fades and glows.The sour air, breathed in and out by eight million lungs, stained by exhaust pipes and strained through ventilators, is never clean, although, after a time, you no longer notice its bitter taste and smell. The dust of ages swirls and falls, staining walls, darkening glass, coating surfaces, clogging lungs." (The first four sentences, C 1) Very Dickensian start (although two stains?)
• "Having lived under burning blue skies every day of his life, he understands that it changes something inside you when you are cut off from the light and the air." (C 2)
• "No one else will do what Job and his kind do, and doing them makes them invisible men as it is. Rubbish must be collected and roads swept, crops picked and chickens plucked, cars washed and offices cleaned, elderly nursed and children watched." (C 3)
• "Self-help at the Samuel Smiles means keeping out of trouble, at best; at worst, it means mugging another boy for his mobile phone." (C 6)
• "They have been carved like trees, and like trees they have endured." (C 8)
• "Children's memories are short, and their ingratitude is boundless." (C 12)
• "Poor people do live differently in Britain. There are so many things that it seems to drive out thought." (C 15)
• "The river of ice that has kept her frozen is melting, releasing a dark cloud of filth just as it does in the rivers at home when the winter begins to end." (C 19)
• "It never seems to strike teenagers that what goes around, comes around." (C 23)
• "The women themselves are largely of a type, being pale assisted blondes in jeans and jackets, clutching handbags so large that Job wonders whether they are displaced persons like himself." (C 26)
• "When I was growing up we were advised to always carry a tampon in out pocket. It's the best way to plug a bullet hole." (C 28)
• "Hers had been the kind of story which she thinks Henry James would never have told." (C 29)
• "Every day, everyone in the world takes decisions to trust people they don't know: trusting those who prepare your food or deliver your mail, trusting those who drive their cars or aeroplanes, trusting the stranger at the door, the politician in the seat, the doctor in the surgery." (C 30)
• "Every time you read a book your mind touches that of the person who wrote it - even if they died a long time ago." (C 41)

August 2020; 419 pages

"The Lonely Londoners" by Sam Selvon

This is a novel about the experience of West Indian immigrants in London in the 1950s, when there were still signs saying'No blacks', when racist employment practices were common, when prices for black men were always a little higher than for the indigenous population.

Moses has been living in Water (Bayswater) for a long time now (ten years by the end of the book) so he is the one the others turn to as fixer. He goes down to Waterloo Station to meet new boy Galahad from the boat train; Galahad stays the night in his rented room and then goes to the Labour Exchange in the morning. Then the canvas broadens to include other characters: Tolroy with his Mum and Tanty, Cap the Nigerian who never ever works but lives by scrounging from others ad always manages to have a girl, Lewes who beats wife Agnes every night until she leaves him, Five After Midnight who always disrupts the parties that Harris arranges. Wonderful characters, loose plot. But what makes the book brilliant is the fabulous mixture of English and patois in which Selvon writes.

• "And this sort of thing was happening at a time when the English people starting to make rab about how too much West Indians coming to the country." (p 2)
• "whatever the newspaper and the radio say in this country, that is the people Bible" (p 2) 
• When newcomer Galahad observes vapour coming from people's mouths in the cold winter, old-timer Moses tells him "Sometimes the words freeze and you have to melt it to make the talk." but Galahad is sharp enough to realise he is being teased (p 15)
• "It all well and good to play boldface in a small place like Trinidad" (p 20)
• "You try to fool people that you know everything, then when you get lash you come bawling" (p 20)
• "It ain't have no place in the world that exactly like a place where a lot of men get together to look for work and draw money from the Welfare State while they ain't working. Is a kind of place where hate and disgust and avarice and malice and sympathy and sorrow and pity all mix up. Is a place where everyone is your enemy and your friend." (p 27)
• "In the world today, a job is all the security a man have. A job mean place to sleep, food to eat, cigarette to smoke. ... when a man out of work he like a fish out of water gasping for breath." (p 27)
• "Yet is so things does happen in life. You work things out in your own mind to a kind of pattern, in a sort of sequence, and one day bam! something happen to throw everything out of gear, what you expect to happen never happen, what you don't expect to happen always happen, and you have to start thinking all over again." (p 40)
• "Things does have a way of fixing themselves, whether you worry or not. If you hustle, it will happen, if you don't hustle, it will still happen. Everybody living to dead, no matter what they doing while they living, in the end everybody dead." (p 52)
• "London is a place like that. It divide up in little worlds, and you stay in the world you belong to and you don't know anything about what happening in the other ones except what you read in the papers." (p 60)
• "People get tired after a time with who poor and who rich and who catching arse and who well off, they don't care any more." (p 61)
• "You might meet them hunch-up in a bus-queue." (p 61) 
• "All he know is that a tanner fall in the road, and he had to watch it else it roll and get lost." (p 62)
• "I meeting that piece of skin tonight" (p 71) 
• "Lord, that is life for you, that is it. To meet a craft there, and take she out some place." (p 73) 
• "The summer night descend with stars, they walking hand in hand, and Galahad feeling hearts." (p 81)
• "He walking upright like if he is alone who alive in the world." (p 103)
• "Next thing you hear, the wife horning them and the marriage gone puff." (p 129)
• "It was a summer night: laughter fell softly: it was the sort of night that if you wasn't making love to a woman you feel you was the only person in the world like that." (p 139; last sentence).

Magical and important. February 2017; 139 pages

The adventures of Moses are continued in the sequel: Moses Ascending.

This review was written by the author of Bally and Bro, Motherdarling  and The Kids of God