a very engaging narrative and i learned about colonialism in Zanzibar which was a new topic for me ( )

I enjoyed this novel. It tells the story of Salim, a young man who leaves Zanzibar to go to school in England. His parents’ marriage is dysfunctional, though he does not understand why, and the book is (as Paradise was before it, the only work of his I’d read previously) about identity, about family, about relationships, and about belonging. It is a bildungsroman on more than one level. Although the story begins and ends in Zanzibar, fully half the book takes place in England. Gurnah is a very good storyteller but what I missed in Paradise was a larger meaning. Perhaps a better way to say that is that although I did get a sense of larger themes and issues, I thought Gurnah failed to emphasize them sufficiently to make the book anything more than an interesting story that was well-told. Gravel Heart gathers force even as Gurnah keeps his pace deliberate. I suppose someone could call the work melodramatic, but I didn’t find that to be true. Gurnah draws his characters very thoroughly and, if anything, understates things. And the more I ponder that fact (about understating things), I suspect that that may be why I had trouble with Paradise. Gurnah is especially low-key and restrained. I think it is easy—perhaps too easy—to miss his larger concerns because of his writing style. In fact I think I may have done so with Paradise. Somewhere in my reading I ran across an observation from some critic who thought that Gurnah's Nobel was more a recognition of his cumulative achievement than for a particular work. The more I ponder the two books I’ve read—I am, I admit, eager to read another one soon—the more that explanation resonates with me. ( )

Gurnah combines a coming-of-age story with that of a family drama, an evocation of life in an African country after decolonization, and the life of a young migrant in England. Ingeniously done. Through the main character Salim, growing up in Zanzibar, we are presented with a lot of introspection, which draws you as a reader into the events he has to undergo and the emotions of alienation and abandonment he feels. In England he succeeds in taking his fate into his own hands, but only at the end does it become clear how much his life is dominated by an event from his youth. Gurnah has also succeeded in drawing a clear parallel between the abuse of power in decolonized Africa and the previous abuse of power under the English colonizer himself. Because of the smooth narration you hardly notice how much the author has put into this book, up to and including the Shakespearean plot.
So, this definitely worth it. Only, at the end there is something artificial about the very detailed and meticulously constructed story of Salim's father, who until then had been a silent shadow. ( )

This is a coming-of-age novel of a new sort, in which the pains and discoveries of growing up are complicated by the experiences of exile and immigrant life. The whole is drawn forward by the narrator's uncertainty about what destroyed his parent's marriage, and his father along with it. The characters are brilliantly drawn and we grow to know their complexities as the novel proceeds. The writing is beautiful. The sentiments are vivid, and often wise. Oddly enough I was reading "The Scramble for Africa" at the same time that I read this book. Amazing how events a century ago still dominate so many lives today. ( )

This book was a pleasure to read. The story of a young man from Zanzibar and his family and their secrets. The protaganist moved to the UK as a young adult, only partly at his own volition, and then stayed in the UK, again seemingly without his conscious choice. The story revolves around the experiences and losses of this economic migrant.
The writing style is intersting - slower paced, longer sentences, limited plot activity - through which the author weaves images that hold the reader's attention and emotions. Such a change from other books I've read recently.
This is my first book by this author who seems to have relatively obscure - until he won the Nobel Prize for literature!