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Summary
Summary
A powerful story of exile, migration, and betrayal, from the Booker Prize-shortlisted author of Paradise.
Salim has always known that his father does not want him. Living with his parents and his adored Uncle Amir in a house full of secrets, he is a bookish child, a dreamer haunted by night terrors. It is the 1970s and Zanzibar is changing. Tourists arrive, the island's white sands obscuring the memory of recent conflict--the longed-for independence from British colonialism swiftly followed by bloody revolution. When his father moves out, retreating into disheveled introspection, Salim is confused and ashamed. His mother does not discuss the change, nor does she explain her absences with a strange man; silence is layered on silence.
When glamorous Uncle Amir, now a senior diplomat, offers Salim an escape, the lonely teenager travels to London for college. But nothing has prepared him for the biting cold and seething crowds of this hostile city. Struggling to find a foothold, and to understand the darkness at the heart of his family, he must face devastating truths about those closest to him--and about love, sex, and power. Evoking the immigrant experience with unsentimental precision and profound understanding, Gravel Heart is a powerfully affecting story of isolation, identity, belonging, and betrayal, and Abdulrazak Gurnah's most astonishing achievement.
Author Notes
Abdulrazak Gurnah was born in 1948 in Zanzibar and lives in England, where he teaches at the University of Kent. He is the author of seven novels, including Paradise , shortlisted for both the Booker and the Whitbread Prizes; By the Sea , longlisted for the Booker Prize and shortlisted for the Los Angeles Times Book Prize; Desertion , shortlisted for the Commonwealth Prize; and The Last Gift .
Reviews (6)
Publisher's Weekly Review
Not until over a hundred pages into this novel does Salim, the narrator whose life we follow and whose thoughts we inhabit, say out loud to anyone in his adopted country where he's from: Zanzibar, a small island off the east coast of Africa. The conversation in which this information is revealed takes place in Brighton, England, where Salim has moved after three years in London in order to start over. First brought to England after high school by his wealthy ambassador uncle, Salim floundered in business school and so resolved to make the life he wanted, studying literature and living alone even though it meant supporting himself. The first third of the novel reflects the almost entirely interior world of Salim's upbringing in a tiny house in Zanzibar, carefully observing the adults around him. An observant and dutiful child, Salim is bewildered when his father leaves home and becomes a shadow of his former self, living across town. At age 11, Salim begins bringing his father a basket lunch every day, "like taking food to a prisoner." Once Salim is in his 30s, the events behind his father's leaving and his mother's continued dedication to her husband become clear, the result of a corrupt government official and impossible choices no one should have had to make. Although the book is slow to start, Gurnah (By the Sea) finds a beautiful, quiet, contemplative tone in which to describe and reflect on Salim's experiences of displacement and discovery. (Aug.) © Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.
Guardian Review
From his broken childhood in Zanzibar, to his new life in London, to his homecoming -- a man is haunted by the reason for his parents' separation The Booker-shortlisted novelist Abdulrazak Gurnah gives us a story with a secret at its core -- and yet, there is nothing manipulative about the withholding of the truth, and no sense that the author is relying on a breadcrumb trail of clues to keep us reading. Instead, and more satisfyingly, he is writing about the cost of secrets that are based on imbalances of power -- imbalances of class, gender and love. The "secret" at the start of the book seems nothing more than a domestic falling-out. Salim is seven, in 1970s Zanzibar, when his father abandons the house; at first his mother says he has only gone away for a few days. Soon it becomes clear that he has moved out and is renting a room in another part of town. At first she delivers him a basket of food every day, then she asks Salim to take over the duty. Neither parent ever speaks of the reason for their discord. The novel is divided into three parts. The first gives us Salim's life in Zanzibar, growing up in a happy family that bafflingly becomes broken. Eventually certain truths about his mother's life become distressingly clear to him, but he manages only a half-conversation about it with her and becomes increasingly isolated within his own anger and confusion. When his uncle Amir offers him the opportunity to move to London as a student, it seems like an escape. The second part is Salim's life in the UK, when he begins to understand more of what happened between his parents, and also discovers the sadness and dislocation of being away from home. He doesn't know how to belong in the strange place in which he has found himself but feels increasingly cut off from the world he's left behind. This is not a new subject for novelists -- Gurnah himself has written about exile in his sixth novel By the Sea -- but that does nothing to take away from its emotional strength. In By the Sea, the exiled figure was an asylum seeker, facing all the difficulties that such a position brings. Salim is in a far more privileged position -- his education leads to employment and there is no fear of deportation or penury. His sorrows come from having two countries and no home; he also feels the awful weight of knowing he has cast himself out of his place of birth because something unbearable has happened that no one knows how to confront. The UK does, in time, become a kind of home with friends and lovers. But Salim never quite manages to follow his father's advice: "As you travel keep your ear close to your heart." The elegance and control of Gurnah's writing, and his understanding of emotion, make this a deeply rewarding novel It is part of Gurnah's great skill as a writer that the question of what happened between Salim's parents dominates neither our thoughts nor those of the protagonist when he is in the UK. Its presence, felt in the background while Salim is making a life for himself, is enough to engage us, carrying the story along. It is only in the final section, his return to Zanzibar, that the power of that untold story makes itself felt. That's when we realise there is a retelling of a Shakespeare play deep within the book's structure; to say which play would reveal too much. Throughout, the elegance and control of Gurnah's writing, and his understanding of how quietly and slowly and repeatedly a heart can break, make this a deeply rewarding novel. - Kamila Shamsie.
Kirkus Review
A boy searches for answers, home, his identity, and his destiny after mysterious family circumstances transplant him from his native Zanzibar to London.A veteran novelist who was born in Zanzibar and has long been a professor of literature in England, Gurnah (The Last Gift, 2014, etc.) offers a first-person narrative involving rites of passage for a character whose circumstances are similar to his own. At a pivotal point the narrator says, "I felt like a character at the end of a novel on his way to adventure and fulfilment." Not so fast, for the protagonist has barely made his way through a third of this tale, and fulfillment might not be a realistic expectation. What little he's learned about the world has come from reading novels, a passion he inherited from his father, who has abandoned the household in something resembling disgrace, with the son sent to England to study business under the patronage of his more worldly, glamorous uncle. "Something broke in my father's life a long time ago and I was the debris of [my parents'] disordered lives," says Salim, as he has belatedly introduced himself. The source of this disorder remains a mystery to Salim even after the birth of a sister whose father could not possibly be his. He angers his uncle by rejecting business for the study of literature and finds a measure of independence as he experiences a sexual awakening. Yet his mother's death brings him back to a very different Zanzibar, post-revolutionary and now teeming with tourists. His father, who had been all but silent throughout his son's narration, now feels himself compelled to illuminate the dark secrets that have split his family, and he does so through a series of chapters that function almost like soliloquies, letting Salim know what his mother did and why. Like a lot of similar fiction, this well-crafted novel finds its protagonist suspended between two cultures, a part of each yet apart from both. Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Booklist Review
Family secrets and a young immigrant's path to adulthood define this novel set in postrevolutionary Zanzibar and 1990s London. When we meet Salim, his father has just left his government job and moved out for mysterious reasons. His father didn't want him, Salim says, and he feels closer to his worldly, gregarious Uncle Amir anyway. At university in London, Salim discovers sex but also loneliness and British cold. He fills notebooks with unsent letters to his mother. Eventually he has saved enough to buy his own flat and book a ticket back to Zanzibar, where he finds his father and spends several days in gentle nostalgic conversations in cafes before turning to the hard questions about his family's history. Booker Prize nominee Gurnah (The Last Gift, 2014) paints his characters and their surroundings vividly; the tumult of East Africa and the restless placidity of the UK are palpable. But his talent for restraint and lack of sentimentality may be the most salient traits of this tender coming-of-age tale, in which fascinating postcolonial textures echo the family drama.--Driscoll, Brendan Copyright 2017 Booklist
New York Review of Books Review
The measured elegance of Gurnah's prose renders his protagonist in a manner almost uncannily real, in part because the author does not elide the young man's transience, but instead makes its slow impact on his life a genuine focus of the story. Salim grows up in Zanzibar, where his family breaks apart when he is very young for reasons no one will fully explain to him. He lives with his mother and uncle, and is confused by his unraveling relationship with his father, who has seemingly estranged himself from not only his wife and son, but also most of humanity. The boy takes solace in reading, and eventually his strong performance in school leads his uncle, who has risen through Zanzibar's diplomatic ranks, to offer him a place to study and make his way in England - as a business student. Once in London, Salim discovers that his family's expectations for him are more than he can bear. He commences an itinerant life in England that sees him cross paths with fellow travelers and immigrants from all over the globe. Gurnah's portrayal of student immigrant life in Britain is pleasingly deliberate and precise, and also riveting, perhaps especially when Salim finds himself alienated. Struggling with intimacy in the face of both what he knows and what he may never know about his family, he is forced to decide whether to return home and see what has become of them. Even the minor characters in this novel have richly imagined histories that inflect their smallest interactions - one of the loveliest pleasures of this book, and a choice that makes its world exceptionally full.
Library Journal Review
At the core of this novel by -Gurnah (By the Sea and Paradise) is a family secret that young Salim must discover in order to be at peace with himself. Every afternoon, his mother asks him to take a basket of food to his father, who lives as an impoverished recluse in a shopkeeper's back room a short distance away and mutters only a word of thanks for the meal. Salim's mother refuses to answer her son's questions about this family situation. Years later, Salim attends university in London, eventually returning home to Zanzibar and visiting his father in the same hovel where he last saw him. Over the course of several days, Salim's father finally confides to his son the dark secret that keeps him estranged from his wife and children. Without sentimentality, the author imparts an affecting story of isolation, the search for identity, and loneliness at home, as well as in the large, hostile capital of a foreign nation where Salim is clearly not wanted. VERDICT Though it would have benefited from some tightening to make the narrative to flow more smoothly, this novel is ultimately compelling, drawing the reader directly into the life of young Salim and his pursuit of answers and understanding. [See Prepub Alert, 2/13/17.]-Lisa Rohrbaugh, Leetonia Community P.L., OH © Copyright 2017. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.