Most Helpful Customer Reviews
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3 of 5 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Gurnah's book tells the loneliness of the soul in exile., 4 Jun 2001
By A Customer
... Many years ago a friend of mine told me she was working on the presence of the absence of the father. At the time I was too short-sighted to see how this might be expressed in art. However, it now seems the most apposite way to describe in brief a predominant theme of Adbulrazak Gurnah's new novel.. There are in fact several themes, to the extent that one might even say there is not a main one. This is not to discredit the novel at all, indeed it merely indicates the breadth of a cloth woven in bright, and unusual colours. Our hero begins meeting his partner's parents and here we have a post-colonial, twentieth century comedy of manners, a la Jane Austen. There is also a focus on malady in an English counterpart to Moliere's Malade Imaginaire: the reader is not quite sure how ill the narrator really is. Is it just a malaise du siecle, a sort of millennium blues? Or is it a metaphor for loss of home and loss of family, the choice. is yours. Parts of chapter one had me laughing out loud. From then on the pace changes. The narrative sweeps us back and forth between our hero's relationship with Emma, and his daughter Amelia, and his family in what is identifiably Zanzibar, minus his father. The time sequence and flashbacks are woven adeptly into the fabric of the text, and some adroit writing takes place. Much of the text is narrative, as opposed to dialogue, and for all that a contemporary reader might be used to having his or her tales recounted in conversation, the focus of attention is maintained throughout. The story of the hero's family takes place as a long lie recounted to the partner, and then is recounted in "fact" by the hero as he returns to his home island. This reads with the authenticity of an autobiography, counter to the first lesson of The Conference of the Birds (forget thy self), which Gurnah quotes: the manner in which the hero gently dupes his partner feels totally accurate, and one can only feel that the partner gets her come-uppance in the end as she tells the hero of her own duplicity. Even the minor characters in the plot, chance encounters on the aeroplane as the narrator returns to the UK have a place in the metaphoric scheme of things. The farting fellow-passenger seems like an archetype of the "mud" up the creek, significantly in the polluted seas between the two countries, into which our (anti-)hero has got himself without a paddle. If I had not been sure that one of the characters of Paradise was an eater of s***, pardon the phrase, by the time I had finished reading Admiring Silence, I was firmly convinced of it and of the nature of faeces as a metaphor for late twentieth century decay. But exactly how it features in this, Gurnah's fifth, and perhaps most successful novel, I shall leave the reader to find out for him or herself. If Paradise was nominated for the Booker, Admiring Silence should be a winner. Diana Crampton
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by Abdulrazak Gurnah
by Abdulrazak Gurnah
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