Admiring Silence

As a successor to his Booker-nominated novel, Paradise, Abdulrazak Gurnah's fifth book, Admiring Silence, presents the despair of being torn from one's roots. Gurnah's unnamed narrator flees to England as a teenager to escape the violent political rule of his native island in Zanzibar. There he lives for nearly twenty years in suburban comfort with an Englishwoman and holds a r...

As a successor to his Booker-nominated novel, Paradise, Abdulrazak Gurnah's fifth book, Admiring Silence, presents the despair of being torn from one's roots. Gurnah's unnamed narrator flees to England as a teenager to escape the violent political rule of his native island in Zanzibar. There he lives for nearly twenty years in suburban comfort with an Englishwoman and holds a respectable position teaching at a university. Despite his apparent success, as an immigrant he is caught in cultural limbo, always feeling marginal in British society. The tales he weaves for his English lover and her family of an idyllic past in Africa console him temporarily, but when sanctions are lifted the narrator chooses to leave the family he created in England and return to Zanzibar. What he finds there destroys the image of the childhood paradise he had preserved in his heart-now he can never return home.

阿卜杜勒拉扎克•古尔纳，坦桑尼亚裔英国作家，2021年因“对殖民主义文学的影响，以及对身处于不同文化夹缝中难民处境毫不妥协且富有同情心的洞察”获诺贝尔文学奖。古尔纳1948年出生于东非海岸的桑给巴尔岛，20世纪60年代移居、求学英国，曾担任凯恩非洲文学奖和布克奖评审，2006年入选皇家文学学会。

古尔纳的作品围绕难民主题，聚焦于身份认同、种族冲突及历史书写等，展现的后殖民时代生存现状被认为具有重要的社会现实意义。代表作有《天堂》《海边》《砾心》等。