Paradise

Rating:
Summary: Deceptively simple, beautifully realized.
Review: More than a coming-of-age story with an exotic setting, Paradise begins with 12-year-old Yusuf's sale by his father to settle a debt and ends with his decision at age twenty to escape his emotional imprisonment. Yusuf "progresses" from the countryside to a coastal city, from simple subsistence to the complexities of urban, mercantile life, from a child's pleasure with a coin to an adult's need for love. With his "Uncle Aziz," he travels to the highlands of a merchant route and eventually, on an ill-fated trading safari to the remote interior.

As Yusuf adapts both to the physical challenges of adolescence and to new mores demanded by the varied cultures in which he finds himself, the country, too, is coming of age and must either adapt to or reject outside influences. Tribal chieftains, Muslim traders, Indian shopkeepers, and German empire builders all contend for influence, within Yusuf and within the loose, artificial borders of Tanzania. Creating vivid images primarily through his selection of the perfect detail, Tanzanian-born Gurnah keeps his sentence structure deceptively simple, and it sings

Rating:
Summary: A most poetic reconstruction of a lost culture
Review: The author succeeds in conveying a highly poetic vision of Islamic East African Culture, without embellishing it or denying its dark side. A beautiful read. I will certainly read more by this author and search for other Black Africans, moslem or not, who can teach me more about their fascinating culture.