Curated by SAM SPRATFORD

In this special edition of the column, JAY BOSS RUBIN shares a mini review of ABDULRAZAK GURNAH’s Theft, freshly released on Tuesday, March 18. JEANNE BONNER follows him with a novel that bears witness to the modern world from a very different angle, at the close of Nazi rule in France. 

Abdulrazak Gurnah’s Theft; recommended by TC Online Contributor Jay Boss Rubin

The new novel by Abdulrazak Gurnah, Theft, is his first since he received the phone call informing him he’d been awarded the 2021 Nobel Prize in Literature. Its titular theft is open to interpretation. The plot turns decisively on an accusation of stealing. Many references to historical thievery are woven into the narrative. But the book’s most unforgettable thefts may be the central characters’ encroachments—those committed and those just contemplated—on one another’s dignity.   

Karim is born in Pemba and Fauzia is from Unguja, two of the islands that make up Zanzibar. Badar is from a roadside village on the mainland, a few hours inland from Dar es Salaam. They enter the story from separate directions, all three coming of age in Tanzania at the turn of the 21st century. Swiftly, they become entangled with one another via relationships of indebtedness and servitude, attachment and attraction. Karim’s world is upended by a series of losses: his father and grandmother both pass away; his mother moves out of the family home, and then she moves even further. Badar is dropped off, with little explanation, at a house in the city where he is to clean and assist with the cooking. Fauzia is a gifted student with a history of seizures; they’ve subsided, but they might be passed on genetically. Gurnah’s central characters are often those cast about by forces beyond their control, perhaps because he was, as well. Gurnah left home in the aftermath of the Zanzibar Revolution, when he was just eighteen, and has resided mostly in England ever since.

Theft contains in abundance much of what Gurnah has mastered across his eleven novels. His characteristic multilingualism is evident from the opening pages. Never predictable, Spanish is introduced in the text before Swahili, by way of a Zanzibari revolutionary just returned from Cuba. Swahili arrives in the next paragraph, along with its accompanying gloss: “Don’t try to fool me. Usinidanganye.”

Like its predecessors, Theft contains layers of submerged history. The European colonial layer is among them, but it isn’t the defining layer. “The Tamarind Hotel was on the narrow street near the old ivory workshop, round the corner from the former residence of the French consul,” a middle chapter begins. “The consul had lived there a long time ago, in the time when the Omani sultans still dealt independently with foreign governments, among them the British, the French, the Germans, and the United States of America. Later in the century,” Gurnah adds cheekily, “the British took over the sultan’s affairs in order to advance progress and civilization.”

Gurnah depicts his characters’ changing stations in life via their dwellings. When Karim’s mother, Raya, escapes her oppressive first husband, she moves with Karim back to her parents’ apartment: two “gloomy rooms,” “airless cells” on the first floor of a shared, sour-smelling house. When Raya remarries and moves in with an upwardly mobile pharmacist in Dar, Karim shifts over to his half-brother’s place. His new home is “small, narrow,” but Karim has his own quarters, finally, and space for quiet reflection: “The sun came round in the afternoon and planted a slowly moving square of light on the side wall, revealing the grainy texture of the lime whitewash.”

Along with gorgeous description, Gurnah distills incredibly complex subjects into single sentences. On the phenomenon of East African children growing up with multiple female caregivers: “It was not so unusual for that to happen, for an aunt or a grandmother to become the mother figure, or for a child to grow up with a sense of having more than one such figure.” On why guilt-ridden, overwhelmingly white Americans travel to Tanzania to study and volunteer (according to Fauzia’s friend Hawa): “Americans only come here to learn Kiswahili so they can understand how to get on with their Black people who of course only speak English.”

In a general way it’s very difficult for one to become remarkable, reads the epigraph to Theft. It’s a quote from Joseph Conrad, a writer Gurnah has admired. Some critics have suggested Gurnah’s Paradise is an attempt to rewrite Heart of Darkness. Gurnah rejects this, as does scholar James Hodapp. Paradise, with its embedded Swahili travelogues, “creates for itself a localized self-referential African literary genealogy, not dependent on European canonical texts,” he argues. A question more relevant to Theft is why Gurnah chose this particular quote. Why would such a remarkable author introduce what is perhaps his most remarkable work yet with what could be interpreted as a cautionary note on remarkableness?

To be denied the ability to determine one’s fate and fulfill one’s potential is sometimes a societal theft, sometimes an imperial one, sometimes both. But ambition that holds no regard for others is also a theft—a self-inflicted one. Along with the collateral damage it causes, it diminishes the dignity and eats away at the humanity of the shortsighted striver. Much more remarkable than conventional success, Gurnah suggests, are kindness, humility and the ability to endure.   

Cecile Desprairies’ The Propagandist (trans. Natasha Lehrer); recommended by TC Online Contributor Jeanne Bonner.

Over the past two years as I completed my translation of Edith Bruck’s first short story collection, This Darkness Will Never End, I have been feverishly reading books about the World War II era. Bruck is a Hungarian-born Italian writer and Holocaust survivor, and I wanted to immerse myself in the oeuvre and world of my author. Luckily, I haven’t confined myself to any geographical boundary, or else I would have never found The Propagandist, written by Cecile Desprairies and translated from the French by Natasha Lehrer.

The Propagandist is an intriguing and sometimes shocking autobiographical novel about Vichy France. Desprairies reveals the anti-Semitic sentiment that seethed in France long before the Nazis arrived. Although she is a historian, she has a novelist’s eye for enchanting, if often chilling, characters: namely her mother, whom she refers to as Lucie to dispel the feeling that you’re reading a memoir. Lucie was a collaborationist who went to work for the Germans and, now that she is deceased, Desprairies also feels free to reveal intimate details about her mother’s first husband, Friedrich, who died young. Though the book is perhaps only nominally fiction, Desprairies has a novelist’s eye for real-life conflict and regret that’s cinematic in its sweep and depth: her mother essentially conducted the rest of her life as though still married to Friedrich, even though she was married to her second husband, the author’s father, for decades. During the period of the Occupation after the Germans invaded France, she and Friedrich were dedicated to converting France to Nazi ideology. At one point, Lucie, the titular propagandist, works on an exhibit whose aim “was to demonstrate … that ‘the Jew’ was always an interloper acting against the country’s interests.”

When reading about World War II, we often relegate it to the remote past. What’s shocking in The Propagandist is the revelation that Lucie and others of Desprairies’ closest relatives lived for decades after the end of the war pining for Vichy France. As the war came to a close, her family was seized with panic: “Unluckily for all of the Cinderellas, midnight was about to chime. In 1944 ‘the bastards’ entered Paris like a swarm of locusts and brought the —the good times, in other words—to an end.” When was the last time you read a book about World War II that referred to the Allies as “the bastards”?

Lehrer’s translation is skillful, especially in how she preserved bits of the original French text, juxtaposing those sections against their English translations. It reinforces the Gallic origin of this tale but without sacrificing the fresh, accessible quality of the English translation.

The Propagandist is ultimately a book about memory, specifically not forgetting. It’s appropriate to briefly mention a poetry anthology I’ve been reading that seeks to “gather works of poetic witness to the sufferings and struggles of the twentieth century.” The book, Against Forgetting: Twentieth-century Poetry of Witness, edited by Carolyn Forché, is so comprehensive and ambitious that works are divided by conflict, which includes the Armenian genocide, the Indo-Pakistani wars and the Apartheid regime in South Africa, among others. It features poems by Edith Bruck, but one line that burrowed instantly into my heart came instead from a poem by Abba Kovner:

Sorrow already on his clothes
Like an eternal crease.