The Book of Secrets: A Novel

by M. G. Vassanji

Overview

In 1988, a retired schoolteacher named Pius Fernandes receives an old diary found in the back room of an East African shop. Written in 1913 by a British colonial administrator, the diary captivates Fernandes, who begins to research the coded history he encounters in its terse, laconic entries. What he uncovers is a story of forbidden liaisons and simmering vengeances, family secrets and cultural exiles—a story that leads him on an investigative journey through his own past and Africa's.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780312150686
Publisher:	Picador
Publication date:	12/15/1996
Edition description:	REV
Pages:	360
Product dimensions:	5.50(w) x 8.50(h) x 0.78(d)

About the Author

M. G. Vassanji was born in Kenya and raised in Tanzania. He attended the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and was writer-in-residence at the University of Iowa in the International Writing Program. He is the winner of the Giller Prize, the Bressani Literary Prize, the Regional Commonwealth Prize, and the Harbourfront Festival Prize. He lives in Toronto.

Editorial Reviews

Rich . . . wonderful . . . entertaining . . . a celebration of storytelling.” —David Willis McCullough, The New York Times Book Review

“A love affair with the past . . . [an] exquisite, tender, and possibly great novel.” —The New Yorker

“Well-written, mulit-layered, and teasingly inconclusive . . . Offers a view of an area seldom treated in fiction.” —The Atlantic Monthly

From the Publisher

Winner of Canada's esteemed Giller Prize, this complex novel is at once a story of the British Empire in Africa and a very postmodern meditation on the allures and pitfalls of narrative. It's set in the racial melting pot of East Africa, where African, Arab, Indian, English and German cultures mesh. The plot has two major strands: the present, in which an Indian-born retired history teacher, Pius Fernandes, discovers a diary written by Alfred Corbin, an English consul stationed in British East Africa (now Kenya) in 1913; and the past of the diary entries themselves, whose gaps and omissions Fernandes imaginatively fills with his own narrative. Corbin is posted to Kikono, a small town near Mt. Kilimanjaro, where he falls in love with his housekeeper, Mariamu, a young local woman betrothed to a bumbling shopkeeper. After the marriage, she bears a son, Ali, who has suspiciously light-colored skin and gray eyes. The second part of the novel follows ``dashing'' Ali's adventures as a successful salesman who moves to London with his young wife, Rita, who as a girl was a student of Fernandes's-and with whom he was in love. In the present day, Rita visits Fernandes in Africa and ultimately convinces him to give up his prying into the lives of ``those who've lived a little more intensely than their neighbors.'' The book is lush with evocations of East African physical, cultural and historical landscapes. But energy is lost as Vassanji indulges in discursive tangents about the nature of history at the expense of sustained dramatic storytelling. (Feb.)

Publishers Weekly - Publisher's Weekly

After his initial examination of the "book of secrets," a fragment of a diary by a turn-of-the-century colonial official stationed in a remote outpost in British East Africa, the narrator, Pius Fernandes, soon loses his scientific objectivity as he finds himself continuing the story that this diary begins. In the prolog, he writes: "Because it has no end, this book, it ingests us and carries us with it, and so it grows." The diary has a life of its own, creating or rewriting history as the vagaries of its contents raise unanswerable questions for its readers that then shape the future direction of their lives. Fernandes finds himself reexamining his own life as an immigrant, comparing his own experiences with those of the colonial official, finding his own recent past connected to the more distant past represented in the diary, and reconsidering certain important relationships, the memories of which resurfaced because of his efforts to solve the diary's conundrums. The many layers of Vassanji's award-winning novel cannot be addressed here. A work of art, it well deserves Canada's GillerPrize, of which it is the first recipient. Highly recommended for all libraries without exception.-Rebecca Stuhr-Rommereim, Grinnell Coll. Libs., Ia.

Library Journal