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(ZM) Book Group: Paradise by Abdulrazak Gumah

Tuesday, January 24, 2023 2 Shevat 5783

7:00 PM - 8:30 PMHavurah Shalom and Zoom Room Bet

Fiction: 247 Pages

Tanzanian writer Abdulrazak Gurnah won the Nobel Prize for literature in 2021. He is only the second Black African to have received this honor. The Swedish Academy praised 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.” 

Published in 1994, Paradise tells the story of a boy growing up in Tanzania in the early twentieth century. The story is told through the eyes of Yusuf, a gentle boy taken at the age of 12 as an indentured servant to pay off his father’s debt. From the simple life of rural Africa, Yusuf is thrown into the complexities of precolonial urban East Africa—a fascinating world in which Muslim black Africans, Christian missionaries, and Indians from the subcontinent coexist in a fragile, subtle social hierarchy. Through the eyes of Yusuf, Gurnah depicts communities at war, trading safaris gone awry, and the universal trials of adolescence. Then, just as Yusuf begins to comprehend the choices required of him, he and everyone around him must adjust to the new reality of European colonialism. The result is a page-turning saga that covers the same territory as the novels of Isak Dinesen and William Boyd, but does so from a perspective never before available on that seldom-chronicled part of the world. 

“Paradise is at once the story of an African boy's coming of age, a tragic love story, and a tale of the corruption of traditional African patterns by European colonialism… It is an evocative portrait of Africa on the brink of change,” writes The New York Times Book Review, “less a political indictment than a poignant meditation on the nature of freedom and the loss of innocence, for both a single sensitive boy and an entire continent.” 

Discussion led by David Newman. Nonmembers welcome. RSVP for Zoom info.

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