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Abdulrazak Gurnah. Admiring Silence. New York/London. New Press/Hamish Hamilton. 1996. 214 pages. $19.95/ 16. ISBN 1-56584-349-5/0-241-00184-6.
If David Dabydeen's novel The Counting House (see the Guyana subsection above) is about a journey, Abdulrazak Gurnah's Admiring Silence is centered on a (non)return. It is a retrospective, first-person narrative, recalling, from an unspecified fictional present, the time when the narrator, aged forty-two, returned to Zanzibar from England, his first visit home in twenty vears. He left behind Emma (English), with whom he had lived all those years, and Amelia, their teenage daughter.
Teaching troublesome children in England, the narrator feels "unfulfilled"-a recurring term. Alienation and self-dissatisfaction, racism which is general rather than the exception, his (Zanzibarian) past so different he cannot make it meaningful to Emma-these and other factors breed bitterness and a withdrawal into himself, both of which damage (and eventually destroy) his relationship with Emma...