A Nobel Prize winner offers a compassionate view of the world

Abdulrazak Gurnah’s “Theft” examines the lives of an expanding family of characters in Tanzania in the late 20th century.

By Ron Charles

In his acceptance speech for the 2021 Nobel Prize in literature, Abdulrazak Gurnah extolled storytelling that sees what “the hard domineering eye cannot see, what makes people, apparently small in stature, feel assured in themselves regardless of the disdain of others.” Such writing, the Zanzibari novelist said, requires a way of looking that “makes room for frailty and weakness, for tenderness amid cruelty, and for a capacity for kindness in unlooked-for sources.”

“Theft,” the first novel Gurnah has published since winning the Nobel, offers an example of such compassionate, revelatory seeing. Even the structure of this story works against the hierarchical nature of plot — that common sense that this character is central and those merely peripheral. There’s something almost disorienting about Gurnah’s narrative as he moves from one person to the next, willfully thwarting our desire to settle on a protagonist.

Oh, he’ll get there eventually, but he’s not to be rushed as he examines the lives of an expanding family of characters in Tanzania in the late 20th century. Read the full review at the Washington Post.