Admiring Silence: By the Winner of the Nobel Prize in Literature 2021

Sure, this Gurnah novel is heavy with vintage whine. So what. But I still love this book, the prose especially and, too, the meditations about diaspora, the implicit and explicit post-colonial issues involved. And I'm not a diaspora 'purist' myself, to recall a phrase from one of this novel's reviewers. And I did not read this book because it's a required text for a class. I read this novel because of Gurnah's prose, seductive, whiny, intimate, and ironic. Indeed, there are predictable moments in the novel, as predictable as the ending of Flaubert's Madame Bovary, when I first read that book. But a novel's predictabiblity is never a factor for me to discredict a novelist's power and talent. I read Gurnah because he's a purist not so much about disapora, but of language.I don't recommend this book to anybody who feels they must read this book for a class. But I do recommend this book to those who care about literature itself.

I chanced upon this book in a 2nd hand bookstore in Oman and because of the Oman-Zanzibar connection thought it might be an interesting read. What I found was nothing that really highlighted the essence of Zanzibar but something more powerful and all-pervading to the consiousness instead. This is a tale dealing with Arab-African culture and European surburbia. It is frank and it is real. Gurnah tells it how it is is. What he is telling is a story that is reproduced many times over due to human migration patterns and the sense of dislocation migrants feel in the world and what they left behind and what they found themselves in upon reflection after living in other worlds many years later. Usually I would not bother to read stories such as this because I would be waiting for the stereotypes to surface. Here they don't. And for this - the book is well worth reading. Much of what Gurnah refers to in his spinning narrative rings true to my ears and experiences and I am not African/Arab nor sitting in England nor male. He cuts through to > the ways of life, the culture one leaves behind, the culture one adapts to, that many people are living the world over and I think some of his insights crystalise a great bulk of peoples lives that are being lived at this point in history. "Admiring Silence" is surely a sarcastic reflective misnomer though. "Onwards with Apathy" may have been a better title. But perhaps it was not apathy as such, it was confusion that led to the character's inability to decide and to act for himself. Sometimes I wanted to shake the main character just like Emma would have but strangely she never did.

Gurnah gives readers the pain and confusion of each insight in the process of adapting to a new culture, which, in this case, is the story of an African from Zanzibar trying to find fulfillment in postcolonial Britain. He falls in love with an English woman, and they have a daughter. But he has never told his family about his life in England. Nor has he told Emma the truth about his family's circumstances in Africa. When he is able to visit his mother 20 years later, he realizes how little he knew about his past. What I especially liked about Gurnah is the unpretentious yet very sophisticated take on identity, a theme du jour in the U.S. literary scene but on a much more hysterical scale here than in Britain. No copycat magico-realism, but a very honest and devastating reflection on trying to be an ordinary man. This could have been a story from my own family, though I have no roots in Zanzibar.