Theft is Tanzanian-born British writer Abdulrazak Gurnah’s 11th novel and his first since winning the 2021 Nobel Prize for Literature. Set mainly in Zanzibar and Dar es Salaam, the story comes into focus slowly. Gurnah is an unhurried storyteller, interested in examining the quiet but complicated lives of ordinary people. His language is rarely flashy, and yet there is a submerged sense of urgency in Theft that bursts to the surface in its final section.
Theft centers on three people coming of age in Tanzania as part of the first generation not born under colonial rule. Karim’s mother quickly divorces the much older husband she has been forced to marry, leaving Karim to be raised by his grandparents and, later, his older half brother. Karim longs for the father he does not know, but he is bright and charming, and soon on a path that will eventually lead to high government office.
While in school, Karim meets Fauzia, an education student whose parents worry that she is unmarriageable because of a childhood bout of “falling sickness.” But Fauzia is in the first blush of liberation and is vibrantly alive. The awkward, good-humored courtship between Fauzia and Karim is beautifully rendered, an emotional high point of the novel.
Like Karim, Badar also longs to know his father. As a child he learns the family raising him are distant, impoverished relatives who see him as a toxic obligation. At 13, he is taken to serve in a household whose elderly patriarch despises him for unknown reasons. The lady of the house turns out to be Karim’s mother, and when Badar is unjustly accused of theft, Karim takes Badar home to live in his household and helps find him work in a tourist hotel.
In the final section of the book, the close relationships among its characters fall apart. It’s not incidental that this coincides with the arrival of British nonprofit aid organizations and tourists, who’ve come to “help” the country and “experience” its people. As an empathic reader begins to wonder who are the real thieves, Theft reveals itself to be a profound examination of lineages, legacies and lies.
