Taught this as the last act in my Anglophone Nobel Prizewinners course in the spring. Didn't know a thing about Gurnah until he won the prize. It's certainly a very good novel, reconstructing both a historical and an imaginary world of early-1900s Zanzibar + Tanganyika, using the Qur'anic story of Yusuf as a framework as well as reworking, possibly out of a kind of postcolonial-academic obligation, Heart of Darkness more or less without the Europeans (but not really). The thing that really distinguishes Gurnah, and I mean that sociologically, is that while there are certainly villainous colonizers and exploiters and compradors, their victims are just as compromised; identity is flagrantly constructed and hybrid. In G's telling, the millennia-long history of Indian Ocean exchange leaves no room for clear oppositions between virtue and vice. Even the protagonist Yusuf, unlike his mythic namesake, hardly comes off very well in the end. It seems very likely to me that Gurnah owes his laurels to being a technically accomplished postcolonial East African author who is not Ngũgĩ wa Thiong'o, whom he has criticized. This is quite consistent with the post-2000 Nobel's pattern of consistently privileging cosmopolitan skepticism and self-conscious political autonomy over the kinds of commitment (political, moral, and linguistic) that Ngũgĩ champions. I'll certainly read more Gurnah but I find his coldness…chilling.