Desertion by Abdulrazak Gurnah is a beautiful book.

It’s funny that I think of it as being beautiful given some of the tragic events therein. The book’s main themes seem to be love, tradition, belonging, and cruelty.

The book is history repeating itself in different generations because every main character experienced a form of abandonment. The unveiling and revealing of the complicated connection was a thing of beauty. The romance stories were well told and not in your face. The tension of the affair made you feel the characters’ emotions.

The mirroring of characters such as — Rehana and Jamila, as well as, Aunt Mariam and Aunt Halima, was well done, alongside the running metaphor of desertion, an ever-recurring motif in the book.

If the book had a relationship status, it will be “it’s complicated.” And if the book was told as a real-life tale to a “Nigerian Deliverance Pastor,” he would term it as “ogun idile.” I don’t know how best to explain this term in English, but it literally connotes a “generational curse” (or something like that).

It was also a rich portrayal of the social life in East Africa especially the Islamic culture. But also a clash of Indian and African cultures, as well as, the English culture. The book’s setting in colonized East Africa also seems like it indirectly built a case against colonialism.

The author’s usage of vocabulary was also awesome.

However, the big jump in the timeline made it a bit disjointed and led to a good part of the stories being told rather than shown. There was so little told of the affair between Pearce and Rehana, and yet it was this singular affair that had a ripple effect on the next generations. Also, to a large extent, the female gender view was negated. It would have been good to get Jamila’s perspective and see a bit of her world like it was done for Rehana, her grandmother.

The sections that were narrated by Rashid, lacked the “energy” of the previous sections. His link to the main story was “loosely” based on letters from Amin. I didn’t feel sorry for him when his wife left because we never got to “meet” the wife, and neither did we experience their romance. The love affair between him and Barbara could and should have been explored a bit more.

It was too convenient for Rashid to be the one to connect the dots and put the whole story together. A bit more showing than telling, and the story would have unraveled more naturally.

But still, it was a “gorgeously devastating” read.

Signed

Olumide Holloway (King Olulu)