Book of the Month: February 2022

01.02.2022

Ewan Dow recommends By the Sea by Abdulrazak Gurnah (2001).

"Difficult to know where to start with the latest 2021 Nobel laureate, Abdulrazak Gurnah, given that he has written ten novels. However, his 2001 novel By the Sea rounded off my course on 'Life Writing: Narratives of Refugee Experience' well. This is categorically fiction - of a most accessible kind - but it does bring together two facets of Gurnah's own real-life story: his arrival from a post-revolutionary Zanzibar as a refugee and his work as a university lecturer in a UK university (Kent).

So the back-stories of the two narrators in stereo - refugee and lecturer, respectively - are surely written from a studied and reflected standpoint. The plot carefully uncovers their shared background from the perspectives of a drab English Channel coastal town and an anonymous London. By the Sea clearly pre-dates the current Channel 'boat-people' crisis, but could not be more contemporary in its post-colonial reach. Kent bed-and-breakfast shabbiness is contrasted with the brilliance of the trading melting pot that was Africa's pre-revolutionary Zanzibar. We meet a British do-gooder, pen pusher, lawyer and lecturer, alongside a cast of merchants from Zanzibar's Chinese, Indian, Arabic and European heritage. It even involves a side-trip to another lost world: the former GDR.

The trigger for the story-telling is a trading relic: a small, intricate box used to store the precious ud-al-qimari, the Khmer 'wood of the moon' fragrance, duly confiscated by an immigration officer. Once the box is opened, the story-telling genie is out of the bottle, revealing an Aladdin's cave of experiences and memories in a search of lost time.

I recommend you read the book, savour it and then watch Gurnah's quietly dignified Nobel acceptance speech."