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The Nobel Prize in Literature for 2021 was awarded to Abdulrazak Gurnah, “for his uncompromising and compassionate penetration of the effects of colonialism and the fate of the refugee in the gulf between cultures and continents��.

In their biobibliography () the Nobel Committee explained that:

Gurnah’s fourth novel, Paradise (1994), his breakthrough as a writer, evolved from a research trip to East Africa around 1990. The novel has obvious reference to Joseph Conrad in its portrayal of the innocent young hero Yusuf’s journey to the heart of darkness. But it is also a coming of age account and a sad love story in which different worlds and belief systems collide. We are given a retelling of the Quran’s story of Joseph, against the background of a violent and detailed description of the colonisation of East Africa in the late 19th century. In a reversal of the Quran story’s optimistic ending, where Joseph is rewarded for the strength of his faith, Gurnah’s Yusuf feels forced to abandon Amina, the woman he loves, to join the German army he had previously despised. It is characteristic of Gurnah to frustrate the reader’s expectations of a happy ending, or an ending conforming to genre.

Which rather sums the novel up, so little need to add any comments of my own, although I found the Azīz figure (Potiphar in the Biblical account) - here Uncle Aziz -the strongest character and I would have liked to have seen more focus of him and less on the rather hapless Yusuf:

His Uncle Aziz came to visit him at that time. His visits were brief and far between, usually accompanied by a visits were of travellers and porters and musicians. He stopped crowd with them on the long journeys he made from the ocean to the mountains, to the lakes and forests, and across the dry piains and the bare rocky hills of the interior. His expeditions were often accompanied by drums and tamburis and horns and siwa, and when his train marched into town animals stampeded and evacuated themselves, and children ran Out of control. Uncle Aziz gave off a strange and unusual odour, a mixture of hide and perfume, and gums and spices, and another less definable smell which made Yusuf think of danger. His habitual dress was a thin, flowing kanzu of fine cotton and a small crocheted cap pushed back on his head. With his refined airs and his polite, impassive manner, he looked more like a man on a late afternoon stroll or a worshipper on the way to evening prayers than a merchant who had picked his way past bushes of thorn and nests of vipers spitting poison. Even in the heat of arrival, amid the chaos and disorder of tumbled packs, surrounded by tired and noisy porters, and watchful, sharp-clawed traders, Uncle Aziz managed to look calm and at ease. On this visit he had come alone.

(Oddly even when the story directly follows the Quran version, with the plot hinging on a shirt being ripped from behind, as the characters directly acknowledge, Azīz is referred to as the Pharaoh)

As for the Nobel Prize? Well my twin Gumble's Yard, who had read this and one other novel by Gurnah pre the Nobel and is now reading most of his novels commented on reading one of them that this was "a Prize I am increasingly realising feels justified less by his often-flawed individual novels than by their collective power and the intelligence, insight and importance of their themes and ideas" (and I'd add Gurnah's contribution to the study of post-colonial literature). This was also shortlisted for the 1994 Booker, one of the Prize's oddest shortlists, referred to at the time as the 'Mogadon Booker' and dull but well-written at the sentence level and worthy is perhaps the best description for this one.