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.
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.
Corrosively funny and relentless... Gurnah skillfully depicts the agony of a man caught between two cultures, each of which would disown him for his links to the other.” —The New York Times
“Through a twisting, many-layered narrative, Admiring Silence explores themes of race and betrayal with bitterly satirical insight” —Sunday Times
“I don't think I've ever read a novel that is so convincingly and hauntingly sad about the loss of home, the impossible longing to belong.” —Michèle Roberts, Independent on Sunday
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