'Afterlives' by Abdulrazak Gurnah

I confess that until he was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature last month I knew little about Abdulrazak Gurnah, and had read nothing by him. Having just finished his most recent novel, Afterlives, this clearly was a big gap. It is a superb achievement.

Surely this book could be a big seller: it’s written fluently, pacily, has an absorbing plot, and is as far as you can imagine from the old image of the scarcely-readable avant-garde Nobel winner.  Listening to a recent Backlisted episode on Dorothy Baker’s Cassandra at the Crossroads, I heard Gurnah’s publisher Alexandra Pringle (from about 9.30 here) describe the moment she found out he had the Nobel (‘the greatest shock of my entire professional life’), and how she had been despairing at his lack of impact on literary prizes (‘in the larger world he was completely ignored’). Somehow this book was not even long-listed for the Booker last year. How?

Then Pringle’s phone exploded with messages as he won the biggest prize of all.

Afterlives opens up a story most of us know little about: the history of colonialism in Deutsch-Ostafrika, German East Africa, a subject fiction seems rarely to have approached, but which provides a richly fascinating background to the lives Gurnah fore-grounds:

Later these events would be turned into stories of absurd and nonchalant heroics, a sideshow to the great tragedies in Europe, but for those who lived through it, this was a time when their land was soaked in blood and littered with corpses.

Starting just before the First World War, it takes a while to find its central figure, eventually settling on Hamza. After the sickening brutality inflicted on him by a German officer (Feldwebel Walther) as he serves in the schutztruppe, he returns to his childhood town, and then a very delicate, slowly-developing love story starts. Afiya is the younger sister of Ilyas, who himself served in the schutztruppe and vanished from her life. In the latter part of the novel Ilyas’s fate is revealed in a page-turning finale that sweeps us along to Germany in the 1960s. There are other memorable characters too, like Afiya’s protector Khalifa and his embittered wife Bi Asha, and the merchant Nassor Biashara.

The book is ‘only’ 275 pages long, but it has the heft of an epic. There is brutality here, but also tenderness. Gurnah is clear-eyed and unsentimental, but also tender with his characters, gently opening up the complexities below their surfaces and giving them the dignity of richly-drawn personalities. It has a powerful sense of place. It does what literature should do: it opens up to us a world we knew little of, through the stories of individual people. Judging by just this book, the Nobel Committee has made one of its best choices in recent years.