Abdulrazak Gurnah explore les thèmes de l'identité, de la migration et de la vie postcoloniale dans ses romans. Sa prose se distingue par sa représentation détaillée des expériences humaines et la complexité des relations. Gurnah examine l'impact des événements historiques sur les individus et leur quête d'un foyer et d'un sentiment d'appartenance. Ses œuvres sont appréciées pour leur profonde perspicacité et leur exécution littéraire sensible.
Un soir de novembre 1994, Saleh Omar, soixante-cinq ans, débarque a l'aéroport
de Londres, un faux passeport en poche au nom de Mahmud. Dans son ancienne
vie, sur l'île de Zanzibar, Saleh possédait une boutique, était marié et pere
de famille. Aujourd'hui, serrant contre lui un petit sac dans lequel se trouve
son bien le plus précieux, une boîte en acajou contenant de l'encens, il
demande l'asile a un pays qui ne veut pas de lui.Lorsque le fils du vrai
Mahmud apprend que Saleh est en Angleterre, le passé ressurgit brusquement.
Confrontés aux clichés que plaquent sur eux les Anglais, les deux hommes se
racontent leurs véritables histoires, pres d'une autre mer.
[A] captivating storyteller, with a voice both lyrical and mordant, and an
oeuvre haunted by memory and loss. His intricate novels of arrival and
departure . reveal, with flashes of acerbic humour, the lingering ties that
bind continents, and how competing versions of history collide Guardian
'One of the world's most prominent postcolonial writers ... He has consistently and with great compassion penetrated the effects of colonialism and its effects on the lives of uprooted and migrating individuals' Anders Olsson, chairman of the Nobel Committee Delivered in London on 7 December 2021, 'Writing' is the lecture of the Nobel Laureate in Literature, Abdulrazak Gurnah. Collected here with three further essays, it explores his coming-of-age, his early experiences in 1960s Britain, the narratives of oceans, his lifelong love affair with reading, and the power of writing to subvert the stories that have been handed to us. Generous, funny and wise, this collection is the perfect introduction to the storyteller described as 'one of Africa's most important living writers'; whose work, now spanning four decades, continues to spin wonder and magic while offering penetrating insight into exile, migration and homecoming. 'In book after book, he guides us through seismic historic moments and devastating societal ruptures while gently outlining what it is that keeps those families, friendships and loving spaces intact' Maaza Mengiste 'A wondrous writer' Philippe Sands
A masterwork by the 2021 Nobel Prize winner in Literature, in which the consequences of an illicit love affair reverberate from the heyday of the British empire to the aftermath of African independence Early one morning in 1899, an Englishman named Martin Pearce stumbles out of the desert into an East African coastal town and collapses at the feet of Hassanali, a local shopkeeper. When Hassanali’s sister, the beautiful and disillusioned Rehana, nurses Pearce back to health, a love affair sparks, with consequences that will ripple decades into the future, when another clandestine affair bursts into flame, with equally unforeseen and dramatic consequences. In this devastating and ingeniously spun tale, the Nobelist Abdulrazak Gurnah brilliantly dramatizes the personal and political legacies of colonialism.
A searing tale of a young woman discovering her troubled family history and
cultural past Dottie Badoura Fatma Balfour finds solace amidst the squalor of
her childhood by spinning warm tales of affection about her beautiful names.
But she knows nothing of their origins, and little of her family history - or
the abuse her ancestors suffered as they made their home in Britain. At
seventeen, she takes on the burden of responsibility for her brother and
sister and is obsessed with keeping the family together. However, as Sophie,
lumpen yet voluptuous, drifts away, and the confused Hudson is absorbed into
the world of crime, Dottie is forced to consider her own needs. Building on
her fragmented, tantalising memories, she begins to clear a path through life,
gradually gathering the confidence to take risks, to forge friendships and to
challenge the labels that have been forced upon her.
An extraordinary depiction of the life of an immigrant, as he struggles to come to terms with the horror of his past and the meaning of his pilgrimage to England
A powerful story of exile, migration, and betrayal, from the Booker Prize–shortlisted author of Paradise. Salim has always known that his father does not want him. Living with his parents and his adored Uncle Amir in a house full of secrets, he is a bookish child, a dreamer haunted by night terrors. It is the 1970s and Zanzibar is changing. Tourists arrive, the island's white sands obscuring the memory of recent conflict--the longed-for independence from British colonialism swiftly followed by bloody revolution. When his father moves out, retreating into disheveled introspection, Salim is confused and ashamed. His mother does not discuss the change, nor does she explain her absences with a strange man; silence is layered on silence. When glamorous Uncle Amir, now a senior diplomat, offers Salim an escape, the lonely teenager travels to London for college. But nothing has prepared him for the biting cold and seething crowds of this hostile city. Struggling to find a foothold, and to understand the darkness at the heart of his family, he must face devastating truths about those closest to him--and about love, sex, and power. Evoking the immigrant experience with unsentimental precision and profound understanding, Gravel Heart is a powerfully affecting story of isolation, identity, belonging, and betrayal, and Abdulrazak Gurnah's most astonishing achievement.
Paradise is at once the story of an African boy's coming of age, a tragic love story, and a tale of the corruption of traditional African patterns by European colonialism. It presents a major African voice to American readers - a voice that prompted Peter Tinniswood to write in the London Times, reviewing Gurnah's previous novel, "Mr. Gurnah is a very fine writer. I am certain he will become a great one." Paradise is Abdulrazak Gurnah's great novel. At twelve, Yusuf, the protagonist of this twentieth-century odyssey, is sold by his father in repayment of a debt. From the simple life of rural Africa, Yusuf is thrown into the complexities of precolonial urban East Africa - a fascinating world in which Muslim black Africans, Christian missionaries, and Indians from the subcontinent coexist in a fragile, subtle social hierarchy. Through the eyes of Yusuf, Gurnah depicts communities at war, trading safaris gone awry, and the universal trials of adolescence. Then, just as Yusuf begins to comprehend the choices required of him, he and everyone around him must adjust to the new reality of European colonialism. The result is a page-turning saga that covers the same territory as the novels of Isak Dinesen and William Boyd, but does so from a perspective never before available on that seldom-chronicled part of the world.
BY THE WINNER OF THE NOBEL PRIZE IN LITERATURE 2021 SHORTLISTED FOR THE ORWELL PRIZE FOR POLITICAL FICTION 2021 LONGLISTED FOR THE WALTER SCOTT PRIZE 2021 "Riveting and heartbreaking ... A compelling novel, one that gathers close all those who were meant to be forgotten, and refuses their erasure." --Maaza Mengiste, Guardian "A brilliant and important book for our times, by a wondrous writer." --Philippe Sands, New Statesman, Books of the Year While he was still a little boy, Ilyas was stolen from his parents by the German colonial troops. After years away, fighting in a war against his own people, he returns to his village to find his parents gone, and his sister Afiya given away. Another young man returns at the same time. Hamza was not stolen for the war, but sold into it; he has grown up at the right hand of an officer whose protection has marked him life. With nothing but the clothes on his back, he seeks only work and security - and the love of the beautiful Afiya. As fate knots these young people together, as they live and work and fall in love, the shadow of a new war on another continent lengthens and darkens, ready to snatch them up and carry them away... "Rarely in a lifetime can you open a book and find that reading it encapsulates the enchanting qualities of a love affair ... One scarcely dares breathe while reading it for fear of breaking the enchantment."--The Times
