Admiring silence

Gurnah's nameless narrator is an acerbic expatriate who fled his native Zanzibar to settle in England. Although he has lived with an Englishwoman for nearly 20 years, he still carries with him the wariness and the hostility of an outsider. Meanwhile, he has concealed from his family, still in Zanzibar, the circumstances of his living arrangements and the fact that he has a daughter, even as he continually plies his English father-in-law with outrageous stories about an idyllic postcolonial Africa, always casting the English in the role of enlightened conquerors. When the restrictions are lifted and he is finally able to return home for a visit, he finds the country in ruins, with the government mired in corruption and busywork as supplies run out and buildings collapse. Gurnah's long, mournful dirge on the dislocation of the immigrant is streaked with a humor so black it borders on despair. Yet the novel ends on a curiously hopeful note, as the ex-patriate returns to England a changed man, willing to give up teaching and take up plumbing with the intention of bringing this desperately needed knowledge back to Zanzibar. --Joanne Wilkinson

This tightly focused story of an unnamed Zanzibarian expatriate who returns home after a 20-year exile in England poignantly evokes the cultural limbo of many émigrés. For his lover, anti-bourgeoisie rebel Ph.D. candidate Emma, and her upper-middle-class parents, the narrator plays the role of grateful colonial, fabricating memories rich with mythical glories of the Empire. Likewise, his correspondence with his family in Zanzibar carefully omits any reference to his long relationship with Emma, or to their 17-year-old daughter, Amelia. At 42, he is estranged from Emma and his daughter, abhors his teaching job and has a dicey heart. When he receives a letter from his mother telling him that amnesty has been declared for those who left the country illegally, as he did, and urging him to return, he does‘and finds himself caught between his sketchy actual memories and his elaborate fabrications. Pressured to accept a relatively prestigious government-sponsored job, and to marry a young medical student, he reveals his situation with Emma and Amelia. His admission hurts his family and dishonors them socially. Upon his return to England, he finds he has lost Emma to another lover. The novel's strength lies in the unflinching psychological honesty of the chronically dishonest narrator as he comes to understand that his abandonment of his family of origin and his estrangement from his created family are part and parcel of his emotional exile. Gurnah, a Zanzibarian residing in England, writes with remarkable sensitivity, demonstrating the same incisive grasp of cultural issues that earned his first novel, Paradise, a place on the Booker Prize short list. (Oct.) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved

A college student's escape from terror on his native island of Zanzibar to the safety of England leaves him a free man in an alien culture fraught with its own inner terrors. After 20 years, assimilation remains illusive, even though he teaches English in a London school and lives with Emma, an Englishwoman with whom he has a daughter, now 17. Feeling unfulfilled, he copes by inventing stories about his life in Zanzibar, at once pandering to Emma's disgust with all things colonial while feeding her father's unflagging dream of empire. This world is shattered when he returns to Zanzibar to visit his family and confronts the truth about his past, his people, and his floundering country. Gurnah (Paradise, LJ 3/15/94) fashions an insightful portrait of a man caught between an adopted country that still excludes him and a postcolonial homeland that repels him. Highly recommended for all collections.‘Paul Ewing Hutchison, Bellefonte, Pa. (c) Copyright 2010. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.

Gurnah (Paradise, 1994), born in Zanzibar, poignantly redefines the colonial experience as he details the ``disappointed love'' that an exile feels for both the colonial mother, England, and his now independent homeland. Suffering from heart disease and homesickness, the 40-year-old unnamed narrator decides to make his first return to the island of Zanzibar since fleeing it as a teenager when its new rulers, after obtaining independence from Britain, began a reign of terror. As a member of the Arab community made up of the descendants of merchants and slave traders who settled there centuries before, he had felt especially vulnerable. Once in England, he completed high school, went to college, became a teacher. He also met Emma Willoughby, brilliant, white, and determined to shock her pleasant, conventional parents. The narrator fell in love with her and wooed her with fictional tales of his past. He did the same with Emma's father, though in this case, rather than evoking the idyllic family existence in an African setting enjoyed by Emma, he tells stories that reflect the old Empire's benevolence. Since Emma disapproved of marriage, the two lived together, had a daughter, Amelia, and for years he was happy, though he never wrote to his family in Zanzibar or visited them. And now the island, he finds on his return, has become a place where the toilets are blocked, the sewers broken, and the stores empty. The government is marginally more benign than the one it replaced in a coup, but the leaders are corrupt, cynical, and unable to govern. Home seems no longer home, and when his family, angered about his relationship with Emma, turns on him, he goes back, his fables confounded, to England, another place that is no longer home--for by now, Emma has found another man. A beautifully calibrated story of a wrenching search for a home for the heart and soul in an age of immigrants and exiles.

A college student's escape from terror on his native island of Zanzibar to the safety of England leaves him a free man in an alien culture fraught with its own inner terrors. After 20 years, assimilation remains illusive, even though he teaches English in a London school and lives with Emma, an Englishwoman with whom he has a daughter, now 17. Feeling unfulfilled, he copes by inventing stories about his life in Zanzibar, at once pandering to Emma's disgust with all things colonial while feeding her father's unflagging dream of empire. This world is shattered when he returns to Zanzibar to visit his family and confronts the truth about his past, his people, and his floundering country. Gurnah (Paradise, LJ 3/15/94) fashions an insightful portrait of a man caught between an adopted country that still excludes him and a postcolonial homeland that repels him. Highly recommended for all collections. Paul Ewing Hutchison, Bellefonte, Pa. Copyright 1998 Library Journal Reviews

This tightly focused story of an unnamed Zanzibarian expatriate who returns home after a 20-year exile in England poignantly evokes the cultural limbo of many emigres. For his lover, anti-bourgeoisie rebel Ph.D. candidate Emma, and her upper-middle-class parents, the narrator plays the role of grateful colonial, fabricating memories rich with mythical glories of the Empire. Likewise, his correspondence with his family in Zanzibar carefully omits any reference to his long relationship with Emma, or to their 17-year-old daughter, Amelia. At 42, he is estranged from Emma and his daughter, abhors his teaching job and has a dicey heart. When he receives a letter from his mother telling him that amnesty has been declared for those who left the country illegally, as he did, and urging him to return, he does?and finds himself caught between his sketchy actual memories and his elaborate fabrications. Pressured to accept a relatively prestigious government-sponsored job, and to marry a young medical student, he reveals his situation with Emma and Amelia. His admission hurts his family and dishonors them socially. Upon his return to England, he finds he has lost Emma to another lover. The novel's strength lies in the unflinching psychological honesty of the chronically dishonest narrator as he comes to understand that his abandonment of his family of origin and his estrangement from his created family are part and parcel of his emotional exile. Gurnah, a Zanzibarian residing in England, writes with remarkable sensitivity, demonstrating the same incisive grasp of cultural issues that earned his first novel, Paradise, a place on the Booker Prize short list. (Oct.) Copyright 1996 Cahners Business Information.