The Review of Contemporary Fiction

Admiring Silence by Abdulrazak Gurnah
Paul L. Maliszewski

Abdulrazak Gurnah. Admiring Silence. The New Press, 1996. 224 pp. $19.95.

“Every several months she would send me a few words about everyone’s health and regards and best wishes, and some months later I would send something back.”

The narrator would frequently speak like this, generally, flatly, with little specificity of incident. He would go to the doctor and then he would go home. He would do this and he would do that. The narrator would think about being from Zanzibar and compare the experiences. At home he would keep his ailment secret from his child and wife. Then he would remember his in-laws and the first time he met them. His English in-laws would always have some strong opinions about his being from Zanzibar. He would tell them, the father especially, exaggerated stories about life there. He would tell his stories in such a way that they confirmed every stereotype held about Zanzibar. He and the in-laws would mourn the chaos England left when it loosened its colonial hold. If the reader misses that the narrator would be ironic in his mourning, would that it were because Abdulrazak Gurnah provided some element of uncertainty. Instead, the narrator speaks in motives that are more explicit than human: “Emma glaring at me! Demanding that I take the blame for my ineffectual love for a daughter willingly overwhelmed by the gloating self-assurance of the culture that had nurtured her.” And “This was where my narcissism lay, I suppose, in my desire to insert myself in self-flattering discourse which required that England be guilty and decadent, instead of playing my part as well and as silently as Pocahontas.” These examples are the wreckage left over after Vienna’s main intellectual export and poststructuralism get hold of a writer who is both eluded by their syntax and bettered by their ideas.

Whole sections of this novel are in the habitual past, a tense which most anyone who works at writing would tell you is strong poison, a writer’s Kryptonite. I’ve tried to write this review in the habitual past and the effort has just about done me in. The tense has been known to induce symptoms of flatness, generality, and sloppiness. Consider the charged situation between the narrator and his in-laws. The reader of Admiring Silence never hears the relatives’ comments; hearing that they would make these comments is a pale substitute.

When the narrator returns to his family in Zanzibar, for a few pages, he’s actually observing. Specificity happens. The change of scenery knocks something loose in the narrator or demands more attention from Gurnah. In these pages Gurnah miraculously halts the novel’s slow nosedive. He finds a way to combine his sociological observations about place and people with a specific scene and characters.

His solution is short-lived. For whatever reason, the habitual past returns. Much of Admiring Silence reads like a struggle between the methodologies of a sociologist and a conventional novelist. I don’t believe one necessarily is the enemy of the other, especially if one takes the fine middle of this novel as any indication. In Admiring Silence, however, Gurnah relies on the sociologist and a boxful of lazy habitual generalities to carry his novel. Would that it were otherwise. [Paul L. Maliszewski]


Interview with Founder Board of Directors Funders Submission Guidelines Dalkey Archive Full Catalog Current and Forthcoming Titles Recent Titles Review of Contemporary Fiction Special Library Offer Special Backlist Sale Stores & Wholesalers Academics Libraries Reviewers Context Casebooks Author Interviews Links Dalkey Archive News Events Newsletter

The Review of Contemporary Fiction Admiring Silence by Abdulrazak Gurnah Paul L. Maliszewski Abdulrazak Gurnah. Admiring Silence. The New Press, 1996. 224 pp. $19.95. “Every several months she would send me a few words about everyone’s health and regards and best wishes, and some months later I would send something back.” The narrator would frequently speak like this, generally, flatly, with little specificity of incident. He would go to the doctor and then he would go home. He would do this and he would do that. The narrator would think about being from Zanzibar and compare the experiences. At home he would keep his ailment secret from his child and wife. Then he would remember his in-laws and the first time he met them. His English in-laws would always have some strong opinions about his being from Zanzibar. He would tell them, the father especially, exaggerated stories about life there. He would tell his stories in such a way that they confirmed every stereotype held about Zanzibar. He and the in-laws would mourn the chaos England left when it loosened its colonial hold. If the reader misses that the narrator would be ironic in his mourning, would that it were because Abdulrazak Gurnah provided some element of uncertainty. Instead, the narrator speaks in motives that are more explicit than human: “Emma glaring at me! Demanding that I take the blame for my ineffectual love for a daughter willingly overwhelmed by the gloating self-assurance of the culture that had nurtured her.” And “This was where my narcissism lay, I suppose, in my desire to insert myself in self-flattering discourse which required that England be guilty and decadent, instead of playing my part as well and as silently as Pocahontas.” These examples are the wreckage left over after Vienna’s main intellectual export and poststructuralism get hold of a writer who is both eluded by their syntax and bettered by their ideas. Whole sections of this novel are in the habitual past, a tense which most anyone who works at writing would tell you is strong poison, a writer’s Kryptonite. I’ve tried to write this review in the habitual past and the effort has just about done me in. The tense has been known to induce symptoms of flatness, generality, and sloppiness. Consider the charged situation between the narrator and his in-laws. The reader of Admiring Silence never hears the relatives’ comments; hearing that they would make these comments is a pale substitute. When the narrator returns to his family in Zanzibar, for a few pages, he’s actually observing. Specificity happens. The change of scenery knocks something loose in the narrator or demands more attention from Gurnah. In these pages Gurnah miraculously halts the novel’s slow nosedive. He finds a way to combine his sociological observations about place and people with a specific scene and characters. His solution is short-lived. For whatever reason, the habitual past returns. Much of Admiring Silence reads like a struggle between the methodologies of a sociologist and a conventional novelist. I don’t believe one necessarily is the enemy of the other, especially if one takes the fine middle of this novel as any indication. In Admiring Silence, however, Gurnah relies on the sociologist and a boxful of lazy habitual generalities to carry his novel. Would that it were otherwise. [Paul L. Maliszewski]

Search the full text of our books: