Blurring the boundaries between good and evil
If there’s one novelist who quietly leaves his readers unsettled, book after book, it is Abdulrazak Gurnah. With Theft—his first novel since winning the 2021 Nobel Prize—Gurnah offers a story that is at once intimate and expansive, a tale of love, survival, and the slow bruises of history.
The novel opens bluntly: “Raya’s marriage happened in a panic.” This incident sets everything in motion. Raya, a young Tanzanian girl, manages to escape a turbulent marriage with her child, Karim, who grows up to be a promising young man. Unlike other men around him, Karim loves to read, learn about the world, and aspires to go beyond the narrow confines of drudgery that he witnesses. Around him orbit two others: Badar, an orphaned child employed at Raya’s house as a servant, who is reminded of burdensome existence now and then. Then there is Fauzia, ambitious and bright, torn between her dream of becoming a teacher and her uncontrollable desire for Karim.
What unfolds is a coming-of-age story of three East African youths, each caught between the fractures of family, love, hurt, and the weight of expectation that one confronts and endures in life.
Readers familiar with Gurnah will fall easily into his rhythm: the way he spins lives through seemingly small encounters, such as Raya’s mistake of speaking to Rafik, a man who has returned to Zanzibar from a war in Cuba alongside Che Guevara against the British. Gurnah subtly explores the political tensions of colonial control and the lives in the post-colony. There is a quiet reappearance of colonial powers in Tanzania in the guise of aid and welfare projects. But Gurnah is not direct; instead, he lets the political seep through his characters’ lives, capturing their fears and anxieties.
The novel blurs the rigid boundaries of good and evil. Geraldine Bruno, the young British software engineer who is amazed by Tanzania, is written with as much heart as Fauzia, who struggles to balance motherhood, marriage, and work. Such nuances make Gurnah’s assessment of human struggle, and what it means to come from East Africa in an unequal world, deeply powerful.
What makes Gurnah’s novels endure are the charged exchanges between characters. The suffocating quarrels between Fauzia and Karim, with their child crying around, are not just marital squabbles, but a portrait of a marriage falling apart, and the ambitions of a couple crushed by circumstances.
Such a recurring struggle is palpable between Karim and Badar as well. There is almost a romantic tension that Gurnah evokes between the two men from different walks of life. In Karim, we see a literate and privileged man enjoying mobility, whereas in Badar’s case, it is the deprivations that present as a foil to Karim. It is left to the reader to wonder what binds them together and what inevitably pulls them apart.
Every scene is alive with the struggles of Zanzibar’s youth, their loves, and their impossible dreams. Not a word feels misplaced. Not an emotion rings false. Gurnah writes with a clarity and compassion that makes Theft less a novel you read than one you endure. If anything, the only demand this book leaves behind is for more—for Gurnah to keep writing, to keep showing us how love and history entwine in the lives of ordinary people. Writing a story of such calibre must come from a place of love and thought, and Gurnah is an example of why we need both to be able to write.