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The Hindu
08-05-2025
- Entertainment
- The Hindu
Review of Theft by Abdulrazak Gurnah
Nobel laureate Abdulrazak Gurnah's latest novel Theft is beguiling in its construction of a fictional universe where lives are upended or redeemed by the cruelty and kindness that the characters encounter. Their own actions do play a critical role but causality is not straightforward here; there are secrets and silences, revealed only when the novelist deems the timing to be ripe enough for drama and heartbreak. Gurnah shows yet again why he is a master storyteller. Set in Zanzibar and Dar es Salaam, the novel revolves around the trio of Karim, Badar and Fauzia as they transition from teenage to early adulthood in the 1990s. What they have in common is a love of books and thirst for knowledge. Their circumstances, however, are vastly different. Karim, whose world is shattered after his parents' divorce, is nurtured by his half-brother Ali, sister-in-law Jalila, and his mother Raya's second husband, Haji. Badar, a 'servant', knows little about his biological parents. He has survived thanks to the generosity of adults who raised him but they too have run out of resources, so he is now employed in the house of Haji's father, Uncle Othman. This is where Karim and Badar meet. Surprise elements Through their intersecting lives, Gurnah explores the human heart's wonderful capacity to embrace people beyond the call of duty or obligation. It is moving to witness the genuine pride that Ali takes in Karim's academic accomplishments despite their murky family history. It seems that since Karim can never fully repay the kindness that Ali, Jalila and Haji extend to him, he pays it forward to Badar. When Badar is wrongly accused of a theft, it is Karim who stands by him, welcomes him into his house, and also helps him get a secure job. Gurnah's genius as a storyteller lies in surprising readers. While Karim is being put on a pedestal, it is difficult to imagine his impending downfall later in the novel. Badar feels indebted for everything that Karim has done for him, so he does not mind the latter's patronising tone. However, some lines cannot be crossed. Karim's bitter outburst at the end of the novel is startling because it challenges almost everything that one is led to believe about the kind of person he is and what he values. Fauzia's role in the narrative is closely connected to how this transformation plays out, but she is more than just a device to move the plot forward. Gurnah presents her as a woman of profound strength; one who is aware of her intellectual gifts but feels low on self-esteem because of a childhood illness that she fears she might pass on to her child with Karim. The novelist's depiction of their courtship is tender and breezy, so the complications in their marriage come across as alarming. Social realities Gurnah is not opposed to giving a love story its happy end, but he is in no hurry. Badar has feelings for Fauzia but he cannot dream of betraying Karim's trust. Karim, however, is drawn to a woman named Jerry, who he meets at Badar's workplace. Read the novel, the first after Gurnah's Nobel win in 2021, to find out how it ends. It is a journey worth undertaking because the author makes one feel deeply for his characters and root for their happiness. In a patriarchal culture that treats women as dispensable, he celebrates their ambition, sisterhood, and resilience. That said, he does not idealise women characters or overlook their flaws and vulnerabilities. In addition to the plot and characterisation, what stays with the reader is Gurnah's worldbuilding that looks effortless but is highly sophisticated. It displays his subtle observations about social hierarchies, the rural-urban divide, and the lure of capitalism in a part of the world that he grew up in but had to leave when he arrived in England as a refugee. The reviewer is a journalist, educator and literary critic. Theft Abdulrazak Gurnah Bloomsbury ₹699
CBS News
16-04-2025
- CBS News
Missing: Dade Badar, 16, last seen in Moorhead
Police need the public's help to locate Dade Badar, a 16-year-old Moorhead, Minnesota boy who has been missing since Monday. Badar was last seen near 11th Street North and Seventh Avenue North at the Family Service Center of Clay County, according to the Minnesota Bureau of Criminal Apprehension. He is described as a Native American boy who stands 5 feet, 10 inches tall, weighs about 160 pounds and has brown hair and eyes. Badar was last seen wearing a black jacket, gray shirt and black jeans. Call police at 701-451-7660 if you have any information on his whereabouts. If you know of a child who may have been a victim of exploitation, call the National Center for Missing or Exploited Children at 1-800-843-5678 or visit the website .
Telegraph
22-03-2025
- Entertainment
- Telegraph
Nobel novelist: ‘Sunak and Patel, whose parents migrated, are now the most virulent migrant-haters'
Abdulrazak Gurnah surveys his garden – and sighs. 'I used to grow vegetables,' he says, 'but with so much travelling it's not possible to do it properly.' Gardening, it seems, has to go by the wayside when you win the Nobel prize in Literature. So does literature. No sooner had Gurnah, now 76, been announced as the 118th laureate in October 2021 than he was launched on a ceaseless round of globe-trotting, speechifying and meeting-and-greeting. Eventually, he ordered his agent to accept no new engagements for six months and finally finished his latest novel, Theft – the book he had been working on when the Swedish Academy rang him with the good news. Softly spoken but forthright, the white-bearded Gurnah, who was chair of English and Postcolonial Literatures at the University of Kent until his retirement in 2017, retains the bearing of an emeritus professor – congratulating me on an insightful question, smiling indulgently at those he judges more banal. We are talking in the new home that he and his wife, the Guyanese-born academic Denise deCaires Narain, moved into a few months ago. With the £840,000 Nobel bounty, the couple, who have four children and 10 grandchildren, opted for an unostentatiously attractive house in a tiny village in Kent. Gurnah has lived in the county more or less ever since he arrived in Canterbury in 1968 as a 19-year-old refugee from Zanzibar (now part of Tanzania). He insists I mustn't leave the area without walking the few minutes to Oswalds, the house where Joseph Conrad lived and died. 'He was born speaking Polish, of course, but chose to write in English. Why? Because you can find an intimacy with a language that isn't the one you speak most fluently. I speak and write Swahili, but I don't think I can evoke what I can in English in the same way.' Gurnah's novels are written in an unshowy, elegant, often pleasingly old-fashioned prose that lends a certain beauty to stories that are sad and sometimes squalid. Several are about the experiences of African immigrants in Britain (Pilgrims Way, By the Sea, Gravel Heart); others are historical novels set in colonial East Africa (Afterlives, Desertion, the Booker-shortlisted Paradise). Theft, his 11th novel, spans half a century and marks Gurnah's first attempt to write extensively about Tanzania after the Revolution of the 1960s. One of the central figures is Badar, a teenager who works as a servant for his wealthier relatives, until he is falsely accused of stealing groceries and sacked. 'That happened to somebody I knew when I was young, about the same age as me, who was a servant – servants in Zanzibar meaning pretty raggedy guys who did errands,' says Gurnah. 'This injustice has stuck with me all these decades. He was powerless, and I often write about the powerless: how they learn to cope and survive, and with some integrity as well.' The book also focuses on Badar's well-off cousin Karim, who, as the country becomes less hidebound and forges closer ties with Europe, seizes new opportunities both financial and sexual, while neglecting his long-suffering wife. 'I've seen this in Tanzania and in many places in Africa: as these new possibilities open up, people do talk themselves out of a sense of what is the right thing to do, and do things that are really unkind or actually crooked.' Although Gurnah makes frequent trips to Tanzania, he would not return to live there. 'I've made my life here. And the same problems remain. Some of the prosperity is driven by tourism, which has its downside: building bigger and bigger hotels is a priority, building better schools or paying teachers properly are not.' Wasting money is nothing new in Zanzibar. He recalls glimpsing Princess Margaret on a visit to the country in 1956: 'They built a special pier just for her to step out on to, which was never used again except by young people diving into the sea.' Abdulrazak Gurnah has published ten novels and a number of short stories. The theme of the refugee's disruption runs throughout his work. He began writing as a 21-year-old in English exile, and although Swahili was his first language, English became his literary tool. #NobelPrize — The Nobel Prize (@NobelPrize) October 7, 2021 He remembers, too, the extraordinary sight of British soldiers: 'We regularly used to have some [Royal] Navy ships coming in, I guess just to show us who's the boss, and some regiment or other would march through the town. I was astonished because I thought they all had great big hairy heads – I didn't know about busbies. 'We didn't think the British were evil. They were just irrelevant to be honest, we just wanted them to go.' Independence in 1963 was swiftly followed by the Revolution, with the majority Black African population overthrowing the Sultan of Zanzibar's Arab government, and thousands of people slaughtered or imprisoned. 'This is what happens with empires. Everything is stable and orderly because there is coercion – remove that coercion too quickly and there is chaos, everything that has been tamped down erupts. This is what's happening in Syria at the moment.' Gurnah and his brother left Zanzibar illegally, arrived in England on tourist visas and fetched up in Kent where a cousin was studying. It was the year of Enoch Powell's 'Rivers of Blood' speech, and Gurnah felt far from welcome: 'It was not about sometimes being abused or being called names, but a constant sense – the way people stop talking when you go into a shop – of 'You're not welcome here, we don't want you'. Every now and then this still happens but, when you're used to it, you don't care any more.' Miserable, lonely and poor, Gurnah worked as a hospital cleaner for some years. He had no ambitions of becoming an author, but began to put his experiences into writing, 'because it helps to disentangle things when you're feeling gloomy. And then you start to organise what you've written – and you're hooked.' While taking a PhD on African literature at the University of Kent, he wrote his first novel Memory of Departure (1987). His 2001 novel By the Sea featured a British immigration official who was notably cruel to migrants, despite himself being of Romanian heritage: a character whose background was inspired by that of the Conservative Home Secretary Michael Howard. '[Howard] was vocal about foreigners, and I thought, what ironies: here's this man – and there was [Michael] Portillo as well – whose parents were recent migrants. It was a very similar phenomenon with Sunak and Priti Patel, these people whose parents were themselves migrants who are now the most virulent haters of migrants.' What accounts for it? 'I think it's racism. I think people of Indian ancestry in Africa, which both Sunak and Priti Patel are descended from, were on the side of the British against the Africans. They see people of either Arab or African ancestry as inferior people, that's my guess.' He is pleased that in the UK 'people are talking about slavery now, and the idea of reparations has become something which is not quite lunatic to talk about, or the returning of various stolen artefacts. There is some movement, as other countries are doing, to listen to the concerns of people saying: 'We are still living through the consequences of things that you did' – inequalities, financial burdens. But,' he says, politely impatient at being nudged into the role of pundit, 'we are wandering a long way from books.' I ask what difference the Nobel Prize has made to the career of a writer who, unlike the other 20th-century British Laureates – Harold Pinter, Doris Lessing, Kazuo Ishiguro – was not already a household name when he got the call. 'A fantastic difference. Suddenly all my books were back in print, translations all over the place. I've been translated into Swahili for the first time. And I get to meet hundreds of these new readers. I've just come back from a wonderful month travelling in Latin America [with] so many people saying to me: 'Your experiences, we go through them as well – the leftovers of the experience of colonialism.' It is a kind of solidarity of shared history.' Gurnah became a British citizen decades ago, giving up his right to be a Tanzanian national as his homeland does not allow dual citizenship. Nevertheless, after his Nobel triumph he 'got an email from the president of Tanzania, and when I first went to Zanzibar after the Nobel there were dancers and bands and a motorcade, sirens howling through the streets'. The British government never sent the new Laureate a word of congratulation, however. 'I don't know why, but for sure they weren't bothered.' For now, it's back to his next book. Does the weight of the Nobel make writing easier or harder? 'The process of actually formulating what I want to say isn't any easier – the computer doesn't seem to realise that a Nobel winner is talking to it. But it's not intimidating either. They gave this award to me for what I've been doing; why should I do anything different?'
Wall Street Journal
20-03-2025
- Entertainment
- Wall Street Journal
Fiction: Abdulrazak Gurnah's ‘Theft'
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).
The Guardian
19-03-2025
- Entertainment
- The Guardian
Theft by Abdulrazak Gurnah review – love and betrayal from the Nobel laureate
A storyteller of understated brilliance, Abdulrazak Gurnah was awarded the 2021 Nobel prize in literature for his 'uncompromising and compassionate penetration of the effects of colonialism and the fate of the refugee in the gulf between cultures and continents'. Born in Zanzibar, Gurnah, now 76, moved to Britain in 1968 as a refugee of the Zanzibar revolution. His books often feature people who leave what they know and arrive 'in strange places, carrying little bits of jumbled luggage and suppressing secret and garbled ambitions', to use the words of a character from his 2001 novel By the Sea. Theft, Gurnah's first book since his Nobel win, is in part a continued inquiry into familiar themes of exile and memory, home, longing and loneliness. It is also a poignant portrait of love, friendship and betrayal, set against Tanzania's tourism boom during the 1990s. The novel follows Karim, Fauzia and Badar, chronicling their uneasy passage into adulthood. Karim's story begins on Pemba Island, where his mother, Raya, leaves her joyless marriage while he's a toddler, first returning with him to her parents in Unguja and later relocating without him to Dar es Salaam, where she remarries. When Karim enrols for university in the city, he stays with her and her husband, Haji Othman. He returns to Zanzibar once he finishes his studies to take up a position in development. There, Karim crosses paths with Fauzia – once a sickly, epileptic child, now a confident young woman training to become a teacher. The two fall helplessly in love. Sometime during Karim's second year of university, 13-year-old Badar arrives at the Othmans' house, sent by his adopted parents as a servant ('There was to be no more school for him. There was no money'). Homesick and haunted by his abandonment, Badar gradually learns to adjust to his new life. While Raya, Haji and Karim are all kind to him, Haji's father appears to resent him. Badar senses that the hostility isn't exactly directed at him, but rather at his real father, 'a restless troublemaker', as he's often been told. It isn't until several years later, when he is accused of theft by the old man, that the reader is finally let in on the truth about Badar's father and his ties to the Othman family. The revelation is a modest development, only confirming Badar's suspicion that 'there was something degrading about his circumstances'. True intrigue begins when Karim, now married to Fauzia, invites Badar to start anew with them in Zanzibar, arranging a job for him at a boutique hotel: a gesture that leaves Badar profoundly, almost existentially, indebted to him. Debt, both as a real monetary burden and a symbolic relational pact, has been a recurring feature of Gurnah's writing. In his 1987 debut novel, Memory of Departure, impoverished Hassan Omar invites himself into his wealthy uncle's home in Nairobi, on the basis of an inheritance that is owed to his mother. By the Sea featured two Zanzibari migrants who reunite in an English seaside town, years after a loan gone awry had led one to lose his family home to the other. Paradise, shortlisted for the Booker prize, told the story of young Yusuf's quest for freedom after he is pawned to an ivory merchant by his parents. It is set in what is now Tanzania; then, at the turn of the 20th century, a beleaguered place on the verge of German colonisation. Theft is in dialogue with these books, with the motif of debt grounding wider ruminations: on hospitality, autonomy and servitude as well as the nuanced distinction between obligation and generosity. For Gurnah, the record-keeping principle underlying a ledger is also one that animates human exchange more broadly, corrupting even the most innocent of bonds. As the tale progresses, Karim increasingly hectors and dominates Badar, demanding gratitude, deference and eventually even subordination and silence, convinced that without his help, Badar 'would have ended up living on the streets as some kind of a criminal'. The final third is the novel's most compelling section. Karim's testiness with Badar takes a toll on their friendship, while his relationship with Fauzia is complicated by the arrival of a difficult baby and Karim's domineering mien. The island, meanwhile, is in the throes of profound change. Foreign exchange rules have been relaxed. More and more hotels dot the coast; houses once belonging to Omani sultans and Indian-owned buildings abandoned amid the post-independence exodus have been transformed into heritage retreats, while old premises, now in the hands of foreign investors, are 'gilded fantasies of oriental luxury'. Everywhere, European tourists with no Kiswahili and little regard for the locals 'went about their pleasures with frowning intensity'. The same holds for the EU-marshalled aid workers Badar encounters, volunteer tourists who journey 'all this way to do their good deeds', bringing condescension, 'such ill humour' and an insensitive spirit of adventure. Gurnah's sly pairing of volunteer tourism and the colonial enterprise, as when Badar muses on the kind of work one hotel guest, the director of an international relief exchange programme, would be doing if she was around 'during the old good times of the empire', hints at harms glossed over in the name of 'goodwill'. The idea of poisoned benevolence is picked up again when Karim becomes involved with a British volunteer, a software engineer bent on a local affair. 'Does beauty like hers make its own rules, disregarding responsibilities and duties?' Badar wonders. 'Or was it that coming to a place like theirs she felt entitled to please herself because in the end it was she that mattered?' Powerful, affecting and provocative, Theft is a vital addition to Gurnah's remarkable body of work; a novel steeped in heartbreak and loss but one that ultimately refuses despair. Sign up to Inside Saturday The only way to get a look behind the scenes of the Saturday magazine. Sign up to get the inside story from our top writers as well as all the must-read articles and columns, delivered to your inbox every weekend. after newsletter promotion Theft by Abdulrazak Gurnah review is published by Bloomsbury (£18.99). To support the Guardian and Observer, order your copy at Delivery charges may apply.
