... superb ... In this story as in history, the German empire is a living, breathing organism with a desire to grow and reproduce and, if threatened, fight for its survival at all costs. Gurnah depicts the white man’s racism plainly ... Gurnah reveals the ensuing sequence of events slowly and expertly, his tone abounding in empathy and devoid of judgment, even as the ramifications of Ilyas’s choice grow in magnitude over the years and decades ... may be an exploration of imperialism and war and the minor, untold stories that get lost in the major, oft-repeated ones, but it is equally a love story. After finding themselves taken in by Khalifa and his wife, Asha, Afiya and Hamza — two young people who have seen the extent of human wickedness, Afiya at the hands of her fellow Africans and Hamza at the hands of Europeans — choose to surrender themselves to each other so that they might build something new and beautiful out of the rubble ... Gurnah beautifully renders their moments of delight despite the brutal reality around them ... Born in the Tanzanian archipelago of Zanzibar, Gurnah moved to England during the Zanzibar revolution at 18, and lives there today. It is evident from this novel that he still carries his homeland in his heart; Afterlives is a celebration of a place and time when people held onto their own ways, and basked in ordinary joys even as outside forces conspired to take them away. Even in times of war, he shows, single women still hope for ideal husbands, businessmen seek profit, spouses quarrel, men gather for evening gossip, loved ones frequent one another’s houses to care for the sick, toast marriages, observe holidays ... [Gurnah] is a novelist nonpareil, a master of the art form who understands human failings in conflicts both political and intimate — and how these shortcomings create afflictions from which nations and individuals continue to suffer, needlessly, generation after generation.
Honesty is perhaps the virtue that this novel, in its undemonstrative way, most extols ... Goodness is difficult to depict without becoming mawkish, but Mr. Gurnah does it superbly. This is owed, I think, to the masterly restraint of his storytelling, which patiently develops its characters and their fortunes without authorial interjections or overt literary effects. One can take away lessons and meanings from this novel, yet such things are perhaps less significant than the sheer seeming realness of the characters, whose presences Mr. Gurnah has faithfully crafted into existence, with all of their dreaming, their sorrow and their resilience.
... the author’s classic strengths by no means render him stodgy, no more than they do V.S. Naipaul, perhaps the most useful comparison. Gurnah has a sense of humor, certainly ... Intimacy rules ... I’d be badly off-base to suggest Afterlives is all about illicit love, or a war novel either. Neither can encompass a narrative like this. Gurnah settles in for long stretches with each of his major characters, all African but out of very different backgrounds, while also covering more than half a century of vast international changes. He brings off something improbably capacious, for a novel of less than 300 pages, and once in a long while this set me fretting about his need to summarize. Every once in a long while, the author sounded more like an encyclopedist than a storyteller ... finds a more intimate gear, prowling the kitchen or bedroom.
Afterlives covers decades in the lives of its three main characters, Khalifa, Afiya and Ilyas. They each experience various kinds of deprivation, salvation and injustice in the aftermath of colonialist brutality. The novel also hews close to some of the German occupiers. It would be easy to make them caricatures ... But Gurnah not only holds himself back from lampooning the Germans, he also makes sure we see how desirable their station could seem to the young men who made up their Schutztruppe ... Gurnah brings all these afterlives to a closure simultaneously ripe with meaning and rotten with evil ... Gurnah...sees in all directions at once. He constructs his latest magnificent novel so clearly and carefully that when his very last lines bring us back to love and kindness, we’re ready to pay attention.
Afterlives demonstrates how gracefully Gurnah works in two registers simultaneously. The story is at once a globe-spanning epic of European colonialism and an intimate look at village life in one of the many overlooked corners of the Earth. Both parts...are equally revelatory ... Atrocities committed by Germany in the mid-20th century have tended to obscure the horror of its earlier colonial ambitions ... Indeed, just detailing such crimes would risk dissolving the victims in slush pools of suffering. But Gurnah avoids that misstep by gently vivifying the lives of a few African characters in all their rich humanity and even their comedy, without sentimentality or condescension ... Afterlives deftly inverts the old Western narrative, rendering the Europeans as background characters, while placing East Africans in the forefront ... Afterlives makes strong demands on readers. Gurnah moves fluidly between the complicated lives of his characters and the reckless actions of old empires. Unless you know early 20th-century African history well, you’ll be googling as you go. But the investment of attention will be fully rewarded.
From the first assured pages of Afterlives, a book of quiet beauty and tragedy, it is clear one is in the hands of a master storyteller ... without the slightest trace of exoticism — just a story of lives lived against the backdrop of larger events — Gurnah makes us care about the fate of his characters, and by extension the physical and psychological space they occupy ... Gurnah’s phrasing has a languorous, soothing quality, even if the events described are anything but. Only in the novel’s final, shocking pages does the pace quicken and is the true meaning of the story — or at least one aspect of its meaning — revealed ... In addition to the main characters, there are several secondary ones, including Germans who play decisive roles in the narrative. Not one is a caricature. All are drawn with a few deft strokes of the pen ... The fact that Afterlives takes a while to settle on its centre of gravity fits an important theme. Everyone has a story, even if they seem peripheral to the grander sweep ... There is an east African proverb that when elephants fight it is the grass that suffers. Gurnah is far too subtle a writer to resort to such cliché. But this is a story of the grass.
The focus of Afterlives is firmly on the fate of a population at the mercy of colonial ambitions ... The ending of Afterlives, symphonic in its scope, comes not with the clash of cymbals but with the quiet close of a gentler movement. Gurnah’s novels never cease to demonstrate how the minutiae of lives are affected by political events far beyond their power.
Gurnah's bravura, beautifully calibrated novel Afterlives encompasses the meld of cultures and languages in eastern Africa and the punishing legacy of European colonialism ... With its narrative heft and economical skill, Afterlives arches over the reader like a cathedral's nave, spanning decades as it charts the strife of empires on a subjugated continent ... He narrates the history of the region, then under German rule, with a journalist's canny ability to zoom into the entwined stories of his lead character ... Gurnah writes battles and marches and interrogations with panache; cumulatively these scenes form the novel's most stirring set piece. Like Zimbabwe's Gappah, he braids Kiswahili into English; the tension both invigorates his language and heightens the struggles between indigenous African peoples and their foreign overlords ... While Afterlives unerringly chronicles the crimes of colonialism, Gurnah seasons his novel with a dry wit ... Until now, Gurnah's career has unfolded beneath our radar, but Afterlives is a superb achievement and a welcome, if overdue, introduction to American readers.
In its calibrated capaciousness, Afterlives enfolds many of the themes which Gurnah has interrogated over the years. There is a bludgeoning colonial project that seduces certain Africans as much as it repels them; lives rent asunder by the chaos of war, exile, return from exile; and the trauma of it all passed down to a subsequent generation ... The spare, descriptive prose, which is reminiscent of Alex Haley’s Roots, recounts the parallel destinies of two young African men ... comes most vividly to life when Hamza’s German commanding officer makes him his personal servant ... But bit by bit Gurnah deftly reveals something much deeper going on, which is born out of the Oberleutnant’s own tragic wartime experience ... What Gurnah does brilliantly is use fiction to put flesh on the bones of African histories that would otherwise be all but forgotten. By bringing to life a character like Hamza, he reveals how humble respect for the most basic human needs is an essential part of resilience.
There is a gentle quality to Abdulrazak Gurnah’s prose; it makes no linguistic leaps or pirouettes but simply sits down, draws a deep breath, and slowly unfurls the tale. Gradually you realise that even as Gurnah foregrounds ordinary people and their stories of struggle and love and fear, what you are actually hearing is the low hum of the continent. Africa looms over the book, overshadowing the individual players, thrusting its troubled history into your consciousness, creating a disquiet that lingers long after ... The politics of dispossession is never overtly stated ... the book strides, encompassing multitudes in the telling. And it’s perhaps the shifting perspective that universalises Gurnah’s writing. The stories of Khalifa, Afiya, Hamza and Ilyas don’t come from the margins but from within the core of a colonised nation that is yet seemingly at peace, celebrating an unfussy survival that defies the festering barbarisms of the colonial project.
Gurnah, who was born in Zanzibar, is emeritus professor of literature at the University of Kent. His novels repurpose the sturdy elements of 19th-century fiction - orphans and runaway children, businessmen wily and otherwise, complicated wills, fortunes gained and lost, stolen caskets, unexpected letters - to fiercely original effect ... A tender account of the extraordinariness of ordinary lives, Afterlives combines entrancing storytelling with writing whose exquisite emotional precision confirms Gurnah’s place among the outstanding stylists of modern English prose. Like its predecessors, this is a novel that demands to be read and reread, for its humour, generosity of spirit and clear-sighted vision of the infinite contradictions of human nature.
Gurnah and his magical Nobel Prize-winning pen tells us the story of a family battered by the complexities of colonialism and their risings and fallings and re-risings. Deep, satisfying, horrifying, wonderful.
These characters are likeable and sympathetic. Initially their connections aren’t clear, but as the story develops, their storylines merge and blend nicely. The narrative is told with a sense of detachment, but its episodic nature remains gripping as it transitions between the characters. This novel brings so much to light of the evil taking place in Africa, not only under colonialism but the cruelty of Africans against their own.
...possibly the most expansive of Gurnah’s ten novels, it reverses the pattern of dispersal that drives most of his fiction: strangers become kin, orphans go home, and a diverse society takes shape in the wreckage of a war-torn colony. But changing direction can be difficult. Gurnah’s title refers not only to his characters’ postwar aspirations but to the lingering injuries that impede their realization ... As in Melville, worlds collide amid the unruly frictions of men on the margins ... The architecture creaks in places. Lively scenes of askari life are joined together by a mortar of historical summary ... Afiya, though intended as a co-protagonist, recedes into the background after the strong opening chapters recounting her childhood. Readers of Gurnah’s more tightly focussed novels may miss their sardonic voices and hairpin ironies; busy with subplots, and narrated from a distance, Afterlives feels more diffuse than Paradise or By the Sea ... The novel’s breadth does lend gravity to its central homecoming.
... sprawling yet intimate ... Hamza’s story is the most compelling and disturbing in the novel, laying bare the abusive and complex desires that shape the intimate relationship between oppressor and oppressed ... Gurnah does not shy away from the psychologically complicated encounters. He exhibits the same patience and care that he shows to all his characters as he follows Hamza through the war, guiding us expertly into deeper contemplations of Christianity’s role in the drive to build and maintain a colonial empire. And through Hamza and Afiya, he provides a window on to the restorative potential of trust and love ... In a world that uses the destructive eruptions of warfare as markers of history, Gurnah shows us a global conflict from the point of view of those who decided to look towards each other, and live. This is why, perhaps, the end feels abrupt. Building to a riveting and heartbreaking climax, the last chapters holds us enthralled, as Gurnah’s defiant act of reclamation reaches its poignant conclusion. But it is too sudden. It is hard not to wish that the story could slow down and allow us an intimate portrait of Ilyas’s later years – that we could linger here as we do with the other characters. Despite that, Afterlives is a compelling novel, one that gathers close all those who were meant to be forgotten, and refuses their erasure.
... a full-fledged literary event—and rightfully so, for it is a captivating, engrossing and edifying work of fiction ... Gurnah offers a rare glimpse into an often-overlooked period at the beginning of the 20th century when Germany flexed its imperial muscles in the region. The narrative takes a pretty quick sweep through the relatively brief history of Deutsch-Ostafrika, providing a backdrop for the masterful portraits Gurnah paints of arresting, interconnected characters ... In the deceptively gentle texture of its depiction of everyday life among seemingly inconsequential people (who, of course, are anything but), Afterlives may remind readers of the work of another African Nobelist: Egypt's Naguib Mahfouz. Yet Gurnah has his own incomparable, distinctive voice. He is a writer who wraps his anger at historical injustice in a misleading cloak, as his characters seem to acquiesce to the inevitable but repeatedly push against what history has prescribed for them. For the many readers coming to Gurnah's novels for the first time, Afterlives seems the perfect introduction, supplying the impetus to explore much more of his work.
The story grounds historical fiction in a stolid narrative. There is an element of universality to the proceedings, despite the story anchoring itself temporally and geographically to a specific period in history. Gurnah deftly manages the feat by spiking his stirring indictment of colonial atrocity with the intimate ordinariness of itinerant lives.
The latest novel from Nobel laureate Gurnah resists categorization. As a breathtaking historical account, this underscores decades-long horrors of war, displacement, slavery, and colonial conquest. Yet Gurnah also intimately captures luminous facets of humanity through unique characters, each with a rich personal background and attention-grabbing, often humorous, sometimes disturbing idiosyncrasies. Ultimately, in this story of a love that transcends pain, suffering, tragedy, and misfortune, Gurnah constructs a remarkable portrait of tenderness, deep affection, and longing that stretches over time and across continents ... Absorbing, powerful, and enduring, Afterlives is an extraordinary reading experience by one of the great writers of our time.
... a century of East Africa’s history comes viscerally to life through deeply flawed, wryly funny, sometimes admirable characters ... Focusing on the daily lives of these people, Gurnah touches on important themes, including the push/pull of various cultures, the value of education for women, and the ramifications of protracted wars, though he fails to delve deeply into any ... Will appeal to aficionados of historical fiction but could leave others yearning for a deeper understanding of the characters’ motivations for their sometimes inexplicable actions. Still, the Nobel Prize bestowed renewed international acclaim on Gurnah’s body of work, making this novel a must-have.
Gurnah’s story is an understated study in personality; the action is sparing, the reaction nuanced and wholly believable, and the love story that develops between Hamza and a young woman named Afiya touching ... impeccably written ... A novel with an epic feel, even at 320 pages, building a complex, character-based story that stretches over generations.
... riveting ... Gurnah’s spare, unvarnished prose shines a harsh but honest light on the brutality of Africa’s colonial past and the violence inflicted by Europeans, which amounts to 'absurd and nonchalant heroics,' and through his rich main characters, the impact of colonialism and other key global events truly hits home. This profound account of empire and the everyman is not to be missed.
