Scala Radio Book Club: Afterlives by Abdulrazak Gurnah

In the Scala Radio Book Club this week (2nd December), Mark chatted to Abdulrazak Gurnah, the winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature 2021, on his latest novel Afterlives.

Afterlives follows a disparate group of individuals who are caught up in the conflagration of the First World War.

Restless, ambitious Ilyas was stolen from his parents by the Schutzruppe askari, the German colonial troops; after years away, he returns to his village to find his parents gone, and his sister Afiya given away.

Hamza was not stolen, but was sold; he has come of age in the army, at the right hand of an officer whose control has ensured his protection but marked him for life. Hamza does not have words for how the war ended for him. Returning to the town of his childhood, all he wants is work, however humble, and security - and the beautiful Afiya.

The century is young. The Germans and the British and the French and the Belgians and whoever else have drawn their maps and signed their treaties and divided up Africa. As they seek complete dominion they are forced to extinguish revolt after revolt by the colonised. The conflict in Europe opens another arena in east Africa where a brutal war devastates the landscape.

As these interlinked friends and survivors come and go, live and work and fall in love, the shadow of a new war lengthens and darkens, ready to snatch them up and carry them away.

Mark wanted to know more about how Abdulrazak wrote his novel. ‘What is fascinating about this book, is that you touch on all this history and but at the same time, you never leave the very small world of the four main characters. I must ask you though, towards the end of the book, it does speed up. It almost hurtles towards quite a breathless conclusion, which made me slow down when I was reading it. To leave a reader wanting to know a little more about the life and story of one of the characters, why did you choose to conclude Afterlives that way?’

‘Well, it's a journalistic investigation that eventually unearths what happened to this poor central figure,’ Abdulrazak said. ‘So, he uses his skills to some extent to follow through the various paths and find out what actually happened. He tells it as part of a project to find out what happened to this person.’

Mark then turned his attention to Abdulrazak winning the Nobel Prize for Literature. ‘As a recipient of the Nobel Prize for Literature this year, how does this come about? How did you qualify?’

‘I don't know! They just rang me and said, “Do you want it?” At first, I thought they were joking. I know they have a rather complicated and lengthy period of thinking about who the candidate is going to be. I was just thoroughly delighted.’

Mark asked, ‘What difference has this made in terms of recognition, stature for your work, and, I suppose, sales?’

‘It's a huge, huge thing. Everybody in the world has heard of it. You don't even have to be interested in literature. There is that first great outburst of information that everybody gets to hear about. A lot of people are interested in reading the books and the sales, from what I hear, are good, but it takes a little while before the information reaches the writer. It is absolutely wonderful though.’