I’ve just finished a story about a man who has everything,” says Karim, the ostensible hero of Nobel Prize winner Abdulrazak Gurnah’s 11th novel, set in 1990s Tanzania. “How do you think the story will end?” he asks Badar, his mother’s servant boy, in a cruel taunt disguised as a moral lesson. But it is Karim who has not absorbed the lesson of the Tolstoy novel he is waving under Badar’s nose.
From Karim’s myopic perspective, the story ends in Gurnah’s title: Theft. “He dies and the servant disappears with what few valuables were still in the man’s house. He robs the dead man.” With his university education and deep self-regard, Karim is caught up in bourgeois assumptions that servants will steal, given half the chance. It is quiet Badar, who survives on a diet of cast-off detective novels and pulpy hospital romance books, who keeps his perspective on what is important for a well-lived life.
