Fiction: Abdulrazak Gurnah's ‘Theft'

Wall Street Journal

20-03-2025

In Abdulrazak Gurnah's 'Theft' (Riverhead, 304 pages, $30), a Tanzanian servant named Badar is listening to an anecdote being told by an older friend, the house's gardener. Impatient with the gardener's digressions, Badar tries to jump ahead to the point of the story, only to be smilingly admonished. 'Don't be in such a hurry,' the gardener says. 'Many things happened. That's how it is in life, many things happen.'
That's also how it tends to be in Mr. Gurnah's novels, of which 'Theft' is the 11th—and the first since the Tanzanian-British author was awarded the Nobel Prize in 2021. Taking place from the 1990s into the 2010s, the book traces the intersecting lives of two men and a woman. The focus of the initial chapters is Karim, who overcomes a neglectful childhood by excelling in his studies, emerging as an up-and-coming government official in charge of environmental programs in the island city of Zanzibar. A marker of Karim's success is his marriage to Fauzia, an aspiring teacher whose path we follow from her own high-achieving student days. The cloud over Fauzia's happiness is her epilepsy, which she fears she will pass on to her children.
Separate from the couple, yet soon entwined in their lives, is Badar, who is sent at age 13 from his farming village to Dar es Salaam, a city on the mainland, to work as a servant for Karim's mother and stepfather. Though Badar grasps that there is 'something degraded about his circumstances,' his honesty and self-possession make him an esteemed member of the household. When events conspire to take him to live with Karim and Fauzia in Zanzibar, he finds work at a tourist hotel, and his status—dependent or a friend?—grows blurrier. 'To himself he said ruefully, Once a servant, always a servant, but it did not feel like that,' writes Mr. Gurnah, a characteristically simple phrase suggesting vast emotions.
In his sensitive and cheerfully unrushed fashion, Mr. Gurnah advances the trajectories of the trio to explore the mutable nature of family. There is an upstairs-downstairs story in 'Theft,' which fruitfully explores the meanings of work and love from Karim's and Badar's different points of view. The novel is also attuned to the influence of Tanzania's political evolution on the characters' private lives (Westerners from relief organizations gradually intrude on more and more of the narrative).