Probably a partially autobiographical story, but one that Gurnah has not fully shaped into a coherent narrative.
The divisive legacy of colonialism afflicts three generations of African and English families in the Zanzibar native (now British) author’s moving yet ungainly seventh novel.
An initially unidentified narrator reveals events following the 1899 appearance of orientalist Martin Pearce in an unnamed village on Africa’s east coast, in what was then the Uganda Protectorate. Pearce (who had been robbed and beaten by his African guides) is taken in by Muslim “shopseller” Hassanali Zakariya. Later, having been rescued from his rescuer by fellow Englishman Frederick Turner (a district officer), when Pearce returns to thank Hassanali’s family, he falls in love with the shopseller’s beautiful sister Rehana. What happens next is withheld, pending lengthy chunks of historical and ethnographic background information—and the story leaps ahead to the early 1950s, as Gurnah (By the Sea, 2001, etc.) traces the fortunes of three siblings (in what was then Zanzibar): underachieving, virginal Farida and her brothers, Amin and Rashid (the latter, we gradually learn, has attempted to piece together the earlier story of Rehana and Pearce, whose relation to Rashid’s family will be even later revealed in a flurry of convoluted afterthoughts). The story does become more involving, as Gurnah details the bookish Rashid’s uneasy relationship with the confident Amin, Amin’s doomed love affair with a divorced woman (Jamila) who leads “a life of secrets and sins” and is involved in anticolonial political agitation, Farida’s own love for a man she cannot have—and Rashid’s departure to study in London (where he achieves second-class citizenship and learns “how to live with disregard”). But the complicated links joining Rehana, Pearce, Turner and Rashid’s family are themselves kept secret for so long that, while the opening chapters here take forever to build momentum, its concluding ones are hurried and overcrowded with last-minute explanations.
Probably a partially autobiographical story, but one that Gurnah has not fully shaped into a coherent narrative.Pub Date: July 26, 2005
ISBN: 0-375-42354-0
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Pantheon
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2005
Absolutely enthralling. Read it.
A young Irish couple gets together, splits up, gets together, splits up—sorry, can't tell you how it ends!
Irish writer Rooney has made a trans-Atlantic splash since publishing her first novel, Conversations With Friends, in 2017. Her second has already won the Costa Novel Award, among other honors, since it was published in Ireland and Britain last year. In outline it's a simple story, but Rooney tells it with bravura intelligence, wit, and delicacy. Connell Waldron and Marianne Sheridan are classmates in the small Irish town of Carricklea, where his mother works for her family as a cleaner. It's 2011, after the financial crisis, which hovers around the edges of the book like a ghost. Connell is popular in school, good at soccer, and nice; Marianne is strange and friendless. They're the smartest kids in their class, and they forge an intimacy when Connell picks his mother up from Marianne's house. Soon they're having sex, but Connell doesn't want anyone to know and Marianne doesn't mind; either she really doesn't care, or it's all she thinks she deserves. Or both. Though one time when she's forced into a social situation with some of their classmates, she briefly fantasizes about what would happen if she revealed their connection: "How much terrifying and bewildering status would accrue to her in this one moment, how destabilising it would be, how destructive." When they both move to Dublin for Trinity College, their positions are swapped: Marianne now seems electric and in-demand while Connell feels adrift in this unfamiliar environment. Rooney's genius lies in her ability to track her characters' subtle shifts in power, both within themselves and in relation to each other, and the ways they do and don't know each other; they both feel most like themselves when they're together, but they still have disastrous failures of communication. "Sorry about last night," Marianne says to Connell in February 2012. Then Rooney elaborates: "She tries to pronounce this in a way that communicates several things: apology, painful embarrassment, some additional pained embarrassment that serves to ironise and dilute the painful kind, a sense that she knows she will be forgiven or is already, a desire not to 'make a big deal.' " Then: "Forget about it, he says." Rooney precisely articulates everything that's going on below the surface; there's humor and insight here as well as the pleasure of getting to know two prickly, complicated people as they try to figure out who they are and who they want to become.
Absolutely enthralling. Read it.Pub Date: April 16, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-984-82217-8
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Hogarth
Review Posted Online: Feb. 17, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2019
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"This soil," concludes the young narrator of this quiet chronicle of garrotted innocence, "is bad for all kinds of flowers. Certain seeds it will not nurture, certain fruit it will not bear." And among the exclusions of white rural Ohio, echoed by black respectability, is ugly, black, loveless, twelve-year-old Pecola. But in a world where blue-eyed gifts are clucked over and admired, and the Pecolas are simply not seen, there is always the possibility of the dream and wish—for blue eyes. Born of a mother who adjusted her life to the clarity and serenity of white households and "acquired virtues that were easy to maintain" and a father, Cholly, stunted by early rejections and humiliations, Pecola just might have been loved—for in raping his daughter Cholly did at least touch her. But "Love is never better than the lover," and with the death of her baby, the child herself, accepting absolutely the gift of blue eyes from a faith healer (whose perverse interest in little girls does not preclude understanding), inches over into madness. A skillful understated tribute to the fall of a sparrow for whose small tragedy there was no watching eye.
Pub Date: Oct. 29, 1970
ISBN: 0375411550
Page Count: -
Publisher: Holt Rinehart & Winston
Review Posted Online: Sept. 30, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 1970
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