Theft
Abdulrazak Gurnah
Bloomsbury
Abdularazak Gurnah’s writing is brilliant, perhaps unsurprising for a Nobel Literature Prize winner. At first glance it seems unshowy, beautifully easy to read and straightforward. At the same time it has immense power to hook in the reader and make them care deeply about the characters and their circumstances.
Theft has three main characters whose lives we follow as they move from their 1990s childhood into adulthood. They are based in the author’s native country of Tanzania, specifically Zanzibar, which Gurnah left at the age of 18 as a refugee before settling in Britain.
The first is Karim, who, though his mother abandoned him when he was a child, was fortunate to have a supportive half-brother who saw that he wanted for very little. In contrast, Badar has no idea who his real parents were. The presumed relations who raised him until he was aged 14 then unceremoniously dumped him onto another family in Dar es Salaam to be a servant. The third character, Fauzia, is an only child, clever and deeply loved but with an overprotective mother who is always terrified her daughter’s childhood epilepsy will recur and ruin her life. In the early part of the book we learn less about Fauzia, but her role will develop.
The family who employ Badar are Karim’s mother, her second husband and his gloomy father. Once Karim is a successful, high-flying and somewhat entitled student in Dar es Salaam, he visits them to re-establish a relationship with his mother and, in what is perhaps a slightly patronising way, befriends Badar. When Badar is wrongly accused of theft, he takes him back to Zanzibar and helps him find a job, working in a slightly rundown hotel in Stone Town.
Karim is a charming and successful young man whose easy generosity to Badar sets up an unequal relationship which, when tested, may prove difficult. However, at the beginning it is happy, and when Karim marries Fauzia it seems Badar has the friendships and stability he has always craved.
However, life is not that simple and in the story of three young people — ordinary in many ways and none of them likely to change the world — Gurnah explores how relationships work. It is not only the interpersonal that he highlights: Tanzania attracts aid workers, and Gurnah shows how the volunteers, however good their original motives, can be predatory and frighteningly careless of the societies in which they find themselves. On the personal level, he shows how people interact — who has power, influence, affection, empathy and need and how these compete.
The story may be simple, but Theft is the kind of book that creates a reality that will stick in the mind of the reader for a long time.
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