I finished a book I was reading and it was spectacular. It’s part of my East African season and I couldn’t remember as I was reading it which of the two Kenyan female authors it was by – the older one who wrote shortly after independence, or the recent one, a young hope. It was a historical novel, so it was hard to tell, and it felt modern but with an older person’s sensibility, so I couln’t quite place it. And no surprise, for when I finally finished it and could leaf back to the beginning (I was reading on my Kindle) it turned out to be neither: it was by a man, Paradise, by the Zanzibari Nobel Prize winner, Gurnah.
I find some rather mixed words on it online, at least in the usual reviewish venues: for instance, John Sutherland in the LRB writing about another novel nominated for the Booker that year, dismissed it with “Novels with New Commonwealth settings and post-colonial themes are guaranteed to get respectful attention”. I loved the mythic quality of it, the gentle allusions, from the Quranic story of Joseph to the Heart of Darkness to Mughal rhapsodising. The sadness, the trappedness of everyone, the sudden spikiness and moments of horror.
Probably I’m not a very sophisticated reader in this regard, but I do appreciate postcolonial writing, and the fish slap aspect of them too.