The first novel I read by Abdulrazak Gurnah
was By the Sea. Like Paradise, the one I'm reading now, it survived my series of book culls. Gurnah's writing, as you'd expect from a winner of The Nobel Prize, is faultless, expansive, thought provoking. His writing proves he understands and loves people. It has that quality essential to all success, empathy and an ability to connect. I am at the point in Paradise, when I am afraid, not of the brilliant characters he's introduced me to, but of European expansion within the continent of Africa. He is showing it as it happens.
These two novels of his both speak to the reason why he was awarded the Nobel Prize this year, "for his uncompromising and compassionate penetration of the effects of colonialism and the fate of the refugee in the gulf between cultures and continents."
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