Synopsis
When retired schoolteacher Pius Fernandes discovers the 1913 diary of a British colonial administrator, he is drawn into a provocative account of the Asian community of East Africa and the liaisons, secrets, and feelings of its people. Winner of the Giller Prize.
Reviews
Winner of Canada's esteemed Giller Prize, this complex novel is at once a story of the British Empire in Africa and a very postmodern meditation on the allures and pitfalls of narrative. It's set in the racial melting pot of East Africa, where African, Arab, Indian, English and German cultures mesh. The plot has two major strands: the present, in which an Indian-born retired history teacher, Pius Fernandes, discovers a diary written by Alfred Corbin, an English consul stationed in British East Africa (now Kenya) in 1913; and the past of the diary entries themselves, whose gaps and omissions Fernandes imaginatively fills with his own narrative. Corbin is posted to Kikono, a small town near Mt. Kilimanjaro, where he falls in love with his housekeeper, Mariamu, a young local woman betrothed to a bumbling shopkeeper. After the marriage, she bears a son, Ali, who has suspiciously light-colored skin and gray eyes. The second part of the novel follows "dashing" Ali's adventures as a successful salesman who moves to London with his young wife, Rita, who as a girl was a student of Fernandes's?and with whom he was in love. In the present day, Rita visits Fernandes in Africa and ultimately convinces him to give up his prying into the lives of "those who've lived a little more intensely than their neighbors." The book is lush with evocations of East African physical, cultural and historical landscapes. But energy is lost as Vassanji indulges in discursive tangents about the nature of history at the expense of sustained dramatic storytelling.
Copyright 1995 Reed Business Information, Inc.
The book of secrets is the diary of Alfred Corbin, a junior colonial administrator in an Indian community in British East Africa in 1913. Half a century later, the diary comes into the possession of Pius Fernandes, a retired schoolteacher who becomes fascinated by the journal's hints, mysteries, and secrets. He sets to work unraveling the secrets of the diary and the stories of the people in it. Simultaneously, he tells his own story. Winner of Canada's Giller Prize, this richly atmospheric tale of lives and events in a faraway place and time tackles the big subjects--love, death, war, intrigue--while supplying a wonderful overview of the ragout of cultures that come together in the shadows of Mt. Kilamanjaro. Vassanji also provides a knowing meditation on storytelling, the condition of exile, and what can't be fully known. A good choice for serious fiction readers. Thomas Gaughan
After his initial examination of the "book of secrets," a fragment of a diary by a turn-of-the-century colonial official stationed in a remote outpost in British East Africa, the narrator, Pius Fernandes, soon loses his scientific objectivity as he finds himself continuing the story that this diary begins. In the prolog, he writes: "Because it has no end, this book, it ingests us and carries us with it, and so it grows." The diary has a life of its own, creating or rewriting history as the vagaries of its contents raise unanswerable questions for its readers that then shape the future direction of their lives. Fernandes finds himself reexamining his own life as an immigrant, comparing his own experiences with those of the colonial official, finding his own recent past connected to the more distant past represented in the diary, and reconsidering certain important relationships, the memories of which resurfaced because of his efforts to solve the diary's conundrums. The many layers of Vassanji's award-winning novel cannot be addressed here. A work of art, it well deserves Canada's GillerPrize, of which it is the first recipient. Highly recommended for all libraries without exception.?Rebecca Stuhr-Rommereim, Grinnell Coll. Libs., Ia.
Copyright 1996 Reed Business Information, Inc.
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