When the Nobel Prize in literature was awarded in 2021 to the British novelist born in Zanzibar Abdulrazak GuryIt was a surprise, and not only for the author. “I wouldn't have chosen myself,” He said. It was a surprise because Gurnah's work does not correspond to the traditional mold of the winners of the recent prize, that is to say European modernists from Olga Tokarczuk has Peter Handke And Jon Fosse. Gurnah's novels are a much more traditional (and friendly) literary fiction, motivated by history and character. However, despite its wide potential attraction, many Gurnah novels were exhausted in the United States when its Nobel victory was announced.
The quotation of the Nobel Committee congratulated the “compassionate and compassionate penetration of Gurnah of the effects of colonialism and the fate of the refugee”. Gurnah was himself a refugee, having fled what is now Tanzania during the Zanzibar revolution in the 1960s, and settled in England, where he has lived for over 50 years.
But if Gurnah left Zanzibar, his books are inexorably removed there, and it is therefore with his 11th novel, Flight. It is a story, which takes place mainly in the 1990s, Zanzibar, whose center moves between three characters, although it quickly becomes clear that one of them interests the author the most.
We start with Karim, or rather with his mother Raya, whose life is described in the effective but nutritious style of Gurnah in a handful of pages. Raya lives on the largest island in Zanzibar, Uguja, and his romantic pursuit by a “Hooligan soldier” attracts his family to organize marriage with a medium -sized divorce, a man “of medium size, much more than five feet”. Soon, she has a son, Karim, who is a living child, “a clown champion at school” – when he is concerned about attending it.
We also meet Fauzia, who will later marry Karim. It is raised in a cloud of anxiety by a mother who fears that “falling disease” – probably epilepsy – that Fauzia has suffered as a young child will return. This infects the sense of Fauzia of herself, and how she will treat her own child in due time, and she repels the expectations of society by wanting to become a teacher rather than a doctor: “In their world, becoming a doctor was the highest ambition, more estimated than finance or law, which was supposed to demand a certain degree of Trémoine.”
But really this novel belongs to the third of this triad: Badar, which we meet when he is sent by his father to become a worker living in the house of a rich family. Soon, he feels that there is something in this arrangement: as a servant, his duties seem very light, the family – with one exception – treats him well, and he quickly became friends with the son of the house, who, he turns out, is Karim.
Thanks to this support, Badar grows. He begins to forget, or at least forgive his father, the “shithead who threw him”, and when he makes a brief visit to his old house, finds the house “darker and smaller” than before, and detects “something submissive” in the manner of his mother. But, of course, it was not the ones who have changed.
The answer to the reason why Badar is so well treated by the Karim family lies in the secrets that families hold. Flight is a book where many are not going, where there is the story on the page and the story under the page. The characters' motivations, especially since love begins to unite and divide them, are on, but the reader must do a job, which makes a rich and engaging experience.
Another tacit problem later leads to being removed from Badar from the house and gives the book its title. He will stay with Karim and Fauzia, who have married and have their own house. Their nuptial parade is pulled by Gurnah with an ironic and sweet tone, of their first samples (“During their third meeting, he held her hand”) to the Mother of Fauzia to romance (“it will be one less concern”), to “the delicious operation” to try to get pregnant.
Badar's exile is more personal than political. Therefore, Flight Feels like a more contained book, located on a smaller scene, than some of Gurnah's previous books, like his breakthrough in 1994 HeavenOr his 2020 novel After the long. But it is no less beautifully done. When Badar obtains a job in a hotel, the story before now begins to look like a prologue, while the focus is narrowing and rhythm. Gurnah skillfully sketches the secondary characters, like the deputy director of the hotel, whose rules concerning the guests (“do not make jokes and do not laugh aloud. Do not touch them!”) Resists Badar – with memorable consequences.
Badar is a boy, then a man, whose life changes several times with his own will. A refugee twice, he leans in the breeze of his personal fortune, but never breaks. As its story is over – when the cord connecting everything is finally linked to the very last page – the reader can only rejoice in Gurnah's competence to give us a lifetime in such agile scenes. Towards the end of the book, a character demands from Badar, “what have you learned in your life, you useless?” Badar, generally, does not respond. But later, when he is alone, he thinks: “I learned to endure.”
Flight by Abdulrazak Gurnah Bloomsbury 18.99 £ / Riverhead Books 30, 256 pages
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