By the Sea

245 pages

English language

Published Aug. 23, 2002 by Bloomsbury.

ISBN:
978-0-7475-5785-2
Copied ISBN!
OCLC Number:
49395277

View on OpenLibrary

5 stars (2 reviews)

Saleh Omar used to be a furniture-shop owner, house owner, husband and father. Now he is an asylum seeker. When he meets Latif, a voluntary refugee, in a small English seaside town, there begins an unravelling of a story begun long ago.

4 editions

Untangling postcolonial complexity

5 stars

It's often said that Herman Melville's Moby Dick has the perfect opening sentence, setting the scene for what is to come: "Call me Ishmael". In these three words, the narrator is revealed as a first person narrator, and as an unreliable source, giving a fake name. In By The Sea Abdulrazak Gurnah references Melville regularly through a short story Bartleby the Scrivener, which we learn at a poignant moment in this book also has different ways it can be interpreted.

By The Sea is an incredible tapestry. It has two first-person narrators. We meet the first as an old man, having arrived from Zanzibar to England, claiming asylum and pretending he does not speak English. Later, we meet the second, a younger man who arrived for refuge many years before who is now a successful academic. They once knew each other, and were entangled in family feud at home, …

Subjects

  • Zanzibaris
  • Fiction
  • Tanzanians
  • Refugees
  • Roman

Places

  • England
  • Tanzania
  • Zanzibar
  • London
  • Tansania