Scan barcode
A review by raulbime
Gravel Heart by Abdulrazak Gurnah
3.0
When Abdulrazak Gurnah was announced as the Nobel winner for literature last year, shamefully, neither I nor most of my friends were familiar with his work. It was unusual because Gurnah wasn't really obscure as a lot of articles during that period stated. He had been shortlisted for and had won other prestigious prizes before the Nobel. An important function of literary prizes being that they bring to our attention books we didn't know existed–as well as Gurnah being a prominent scholar of African literature, therefore it was ridiculous that even though the name was familiar to some of us, only one person I knew had read his work (one book) before the announcement.
The reader follows Salim, the protagonist, from his childhood in Zanzibar to his immigrating to Britain. A coming of age story–that's enmeshed with a family story–that tracks the protagonist's life through his wanderings and wonderings. It required some patience on my part as it meanders at parts. There are many people that come in and out of the story (as it happens mostly in life), and this could be classified as a quiet book, despite the turbulence now and then, in some ways.
Reading this book it became clear why his work hadn't come to our attention as it ought to. The elegiac inward prose here contrasted with the declarative and symbolic which is favoured amongst those who arrange school curricula, where a lot of us learn about African literature (trademarked, obviously). There's little room for decoding and unravelling, little room for picking apart words and actions and characters to find hidden meaning, no preaching or moralizing, and instead wonderful prose that works at those familiar themes of colonization, power and class struggle, immigration, among others. These themes do not take primary place in the story with their existence mainly for the characters to find their ways through, but as the conditions they are that human beings grapple with. I've been informed that this is not the author's best work and so this will be the first, hopefully, of more books I read by him.
The reader follows Salim, the protagonist, from his childhood in Zanzibar to his immigrating to Britain. A coming of age story–that's enmeshed with a family story–that tracks the protagonist's life through his wanderings and wonderings. It required some patience on my part as it meanders at parts. There are many people that come in and out of the story (as it happens mostly in life), and this could be classified as a quiet book, despite the turbulence now and then, in some ways.
Reading this book it became clear why his work hadn't come to our attention as it ought to. The elegiac inward prose here contrasted with the declarative and symbolic which is favoured amongst those who arrange school curricula, where a lot of us learn about African literature (trademarked, obviously). There's little room for decoding and unravelling, little room for picking apart words and actions and characters to find hidden meaning, no preaching or moralizing, and instead wonderful prose that works at those familiar themes of colonization, power and class struggle, immigration, among others. These themes do not take primary place in the story with their existence mainly for the characters to find their ways through, but as the conditions they are that human beings grapple with. I've been informed that this is not the author's best work and so this will be the first, hopefully, of more books I read by him.