Desertion: A Review

I just finished the book Desertion and I think such a good piece of writing deserves a review. 

It took me time to get hooked on it, and I must admit that I was reading with a deadline on my mind, since I have to write a paper on the book and it is due shortly. However, the book that started as a pain in the neck ended up as one of the most beautiful, touching and sad stories I have read. 

I feel compelled to praise Abdulrazak Gurnah and his incredible writing. Most of the time, especially during the first chapters, you wonder what exactly the story is about, what the author is telling you. I remember my surprise when, after the book starts telling you about the love story about Martin Pearce and Rehana, there’s the interruption. But then, when you head into the second part you start seeing the connections and the reason why he explained their story first. And the culmination of the story, when you can’t help but thinking “OH MY GOD!” it’s the final chapter, A Continuation. That’s when everything that hadn’t made sense until now makes sense, and one cannot do anything else but feel impressed before the extreme wittiness of Gurnah. 

Also the writing style itself, the book has many different moving passages, but the most moving of them all for me was when Rashid – who can be considered as an alter ego of Gurnah himself who also is exiled from his country – admits his loneliness and sorrow, and how he feels an alien, starting to look at himself through the European’s eyes. I found it as an escape for Gurnah, who through Rashid tells his own story of desertion and exile, and I may be wrong but it made me feel closer to him even though I cannot even start to grasp what he felt. This book gave me another view of the world, different from the European one; and it made me rethink concepts and things that we western people think as common and usual but may not be usual and common to other cultures.

For anyone out there who wants to read this, beware that this is not a book of a world we, Europeans, know. It is a book about Zanzibar in the times before, during and after Independence; all explained through love stories and the terrible tragedy of a man who is deserted from his country, alienated, exiled. It is not a happy book and it is definitely not a book full of hope, but it is a book worthy of reading nevertheless.