The 3 best books of Abdulrazak Gurnah

The award Nobel Prize in Literature 2021 has blessed a Tanzanian author like Gurnah above the most recalcitrant candidates like Murakami or Javier Marías which is also beginning to appear in pools for the Nobel Prize in Literature each year, with that bad omen that not infrequently accompanies those who end up nominated for the award.

The point is that Abdulrazak Gurnah has its explanation. In fact, any winner has his motivation since Dylan won the most prestigious award in world letters. I do not want to be bad, the truth is that precisely in that explanatory statement that usually accompanies each recognition, like a haiku that extols the values ​​of the writer on duty, there is room for justifications of the type: "because of the tangible sensation of the soul in the narrations of the author "or" highlighting the exquisite characterization of the intense humanity of the characters ... ".

In the case of Gurnah, the shots go through this chronic work of the effects and consequences of colonization. All from an intrahistoric prism that charges each and every one of the eyes with empathy. And it is true that Gurnah manages to convey that perspective from the eyes of his characters. This is how literature with capital letters is achieved, making our experiences in notable historical circumstances or in scenarios that bring us closer to the most opposed poles of the human.

Awaiting reissues and new editions in various languages. Here we go with the most noteworthy so far of a Abdulrazak Gurnah focused on the one that already, from the Nobel 2021, it will be your island: Zanzibar.

Top 3 recommended novels of Abdulrazak Gurnah

Paradise

The adult world seen from childhood is always a rich source from which to refresh our most essential contradictions. First because a world is discovered far from the moral standards that we are taught, second because it involves a direct clash between imagination and prosaic reality third because in some cases stolen childhood is the worst of cruelties and only child heroes can escape it .

In Muslim East Africa, on the eve of World War I, a Swahili boy who dreams strange dreams leaves his home to follow Uncle Aziz, a wealthy Arab merchant from the coast. In this initiatory journey, the first knowledge that Yusuf acquires is that Aziz is not his uncle: his father, bankrupt, has sold him to pay off part of his debts.

Forced to take care of Aziz's shop, Yusuf also takes care of his master's walled garden, that green paradise bathed by four streams. In the encrypted garden, secret loves consume the protagonists. Mirrors hang from the trees in which the master's sad and disfigured wife observes and spies. A servant girl walks the paths whom Yusuf wishes hopelessly. Tales of the alien world resound in the air, even more arcane: the dark interior of Africa, guarded by lycanthropes, site of the earthly paradise whose doors vomit fire.

life after

While still a child, Ilyas was taken from his parents by German colonial troops; After years of absence and battle against his own people, he returns to the town of his childhood, where his parents have disappeared and his sister Afiya has been given up for adoption. Another young man returns at the same time: Hamza was not stolen to fight, but sold. With only the clothes on his back, he is limited to looking for work and security... and the love of the beautiful Afiya.

The XNUMXth century has just begun and the Germans, British, French and other countries have divided up the African continent. As these young survivors try to rebuild their lives, the shadow of a new war on another continent threatens to take them away again.

Seaside

Life remains on the shore for the emigrants of paradise with its days of unsustainable hell. It has always been said that islanders suffer more homelessness when they leave the island than island visitors suffer from the feeling of claustrophobia. It will be due to the opposite effect, due to an agorophobic notion of a world that becomes too big, where one is always a foreigner.

"Like all my life, I live in a small city by the sea, but most of it has passed on the shores of a great green ocean, very far from here." In the late afternoon of November 13, Saleh Omar arrives at Gatwick Airport. For all luggage, a mahogany box filled with incense. He has been many things, but now he is nothing more than a refugee sheltered in silence. Meanwhile, Latif Mahmud, a poet, teacher and voluntary exile, lives alone in his quiet London apartment.

The paradise that these two men have left is Zanzibar, an island in the Indian Ocean swept by the monsoons, which bring the perfume and spice merchants. When they meet a small English seaside town, a long history that began long before begins to unravel: loves and betrayals, seductions and disappointments, hazardous displacements and litigation.

Other recommended books Abdulrazak Gurnah...

Precarious silence

Who is silent does not grant. No saying so inaccurate. Whoever remains silent guards his thoughts, ideas and notions of the world like a Pandora's box. We cannot accept anything for the mere silence of the other. A story about how the passage of time, and that load of silence that is falling like sand on the beach, can end up erecting inexhaustible mountains of incomprehension.

This novel, published by El Aleph in 1998, stars a refugee from Zazibar who has resided in Great Britain since he fled his land illegally. After completing his studies there, he has been able to start earning a living in a teaching job that he hates. At the same time, he maintains a relationship with Emma, ​​a student from a bourgeois family with whom he has a 17-year-old daughter. When an amnesty is decreed in his country, his mother invites him to return to find her a wife, not knowing that he already shares his life with another person, and that he also has a family with her.