Afterlives

This novel, currently Gurnah’s latest of ten, was published in 2020, and in 2021 he was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature. I can only conclude that he won the Prize for his earlier body of work, for it seems to me that this novel falls massively short of what one would expect from a Noble laureate. I thought it was poorly structured and, although interesting about the political background and about the impact it had on the characters in the novel, I could not, for the most part, work up an interest in the accounts of their relationship to each other or in the mundane details of their everyday lives, however well the main personalities are described. The background of the first half of the story is the ruthless German occupation of Zanzibar and Tanganyika which had begun in 1884. The German Schutztruppe or askaris had, over several years, brutally crushed revolts by local tribes. One of the principal characters is Khalifa, the son of an African mother, and a Muslim Gujerati-born father. At the age of 26, Khalifa was working for Amur Bishara, a ruthless and unscrupulous merchant. Three years later, in 1907, after Khalifa’s parents had died, Amur arranged for him to marry his orphaned 20 year old niece Asha. She soon showed herself to be a strong-minded, more religious than Khalifa, and impatient with her meek husband’s service to Amur. Then Amur died, and Khalifa worked for his son Nassor. Khalifa’s best friend was Ilyas, whose story we eventually learn. He had run away from home when he was eleven, just before his sister Afiya was born. He eventually worked for nine years on a German coffee farm. The Germans also sent him to a German school, and later he worked as a clerk in a German sisal factory. Then he went in search of his family. He found that his parents had died, and that Afiya who had been taken in by an uncle and aunt. They exploited her, and their own children had made her life hell. They made no objections to him taking Afiya to live with him. He taught her to read and write. Because the Germans had treated him kindly, Ilyas was not only pro-German, but even, to Khalifa’s dismay, volunteered to join their askaris. This meant that Afiya could no longer stay with him and she was sent back to her uncle and aunt. When they discovered that she had learnt to write, the uncle bear her mercilessly, breaking her left hand. With her right hand she managed to write a note to a friend of Khalifa’s, and Khalifa and Asha took her in. Her hand gradually improved. Asha gradually controlled Afiya. We now switch to another character, Hamza. We learn later that Hamza’s father had made him a bondman to a merchant to cover his debts to him. The merchant lived in the town in which most of the story is set, but which is never named. Hamza ran away from him, and tried to find his family, but failed. He th...

It won the 2021 Nobel prize and is definitely worth the read.

The way he turns a word, phrase, sentence so smoothly, yet saying so much. Encourages further study and research.

Warning: the new copy of this book I received from a UK seller is of very poor quality material-wise: the font is somewhat small and light, and the paper is newsprint quality only, already yellowing, with 37 lines per page. I have another Gurnah paperback novel from a different publisher, and this is of much better production quality, with better paper, darker ink, slightly larger font size, and fewer lines squeezed onto the page. My guess is that since the Nobel Prize award, printing was rushed with less care for quality of the ink and paper.