Abdulrazak Gurnah, whose 10th novel is now available in the U.S., has spent more than three decades chronicling the Swahili coast and its diaspora, in wry, wandering fiction whose understated style belies its narrative sophistication.
It’s a story of truncated youth set in a squalid, post-revolutionary Zanzibar—and an apologia, of sorts, for emigration. The adolescent narrator, Hassan, endures his brother’s death, his tyrannical father’s alcoholism, his sister’s turn to prostitution, and the foreclosure of his Arab family’s future by the new government. He leaves the island to pursue an inheritance from a rich uncle in Nairobi, but a romantic transgression forces him to leave Kenya for a life at sea.
In the ensuing years, Gurnah’s fiction came to synthesize the British and the Tanzanian halves of his experience in stereoscopic narratives charged with irony. “By the Sea,” the most accomplished of his novels, revolves around a chance encounter between two migrants with bitterly entangled histories. Saleh Omar, a wily old furniture merchant with a memorably sarcastic sensibility, narrates the first section of the novel, which begins when he arrives seeking asylum at London’s Gatwick Airport.
Omar is mourning a daughter; Latif, an older brother who went off with a man who had sexually abused him. With time, sharing their versions of what happened becomes an unexpected form of consolation. “He was my shriver,” Omar reflects. “I needed to be shriven of the burden of events and stories which I have never been able to tell, and which by telling would fulfil the craving I feel to be listened to with understanding.
A number of false families precede their union. Several of the novel’s most memorable scenes transpire at the German fort, where theinhabit a world as governed by taboos, intimate hierarchies, and the ever-present threat of dishonor as any traditional household.
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