2005年NPR美国国家公共电台八月-An Epic Tale of 'Desertion'

（单词翻译）

Desertion is the title of a new novel by Zanzibar-born writer Abdulrazak Gurnah. It opens in 1899 along the East African Coast. Alan Cheuse has a review.

A white stranger, sick and wounded, staggers into a small East African town. A local shop owner named Hassanali demonstrates his piety¹ by taking the man in and having his family care for him, while the news goes out to the British authorities in the region that one of their own has turned up nearly dead. Before a British colonial official arrives at Hassanali's house to claim him, the injured man, a writer and traveler named Martin Pearce, falls madly in love with Hassanali's sister Rehana, with a kind of disbelief at the astonishing beauty of her eyes, and the delicate movements of her face. Having been abandoned by her first and only husband, Rehana is as taken with Pearce as he is with her, and goes against all customs in this conservative Muslim region, running off with the man to set up a household in Mombasa.

What would have made an Englishman of his background--- university, colonial official, a scholar, begin something like that with the sister of a shopkeeper in a small town on the East African Coast?

This comes from the narrator, from whom the question lies at the heart of a family and I suppose you have to call it an anthropological² and possibly a national mystery. We encounter the narrator himself many pages later after he described yet another love affair. This one between the granddaughter of Rehana, the lovely and creamy-skinned Jamila, and a local Muslim fellow much younger than she.

That second romance catapults the book forward in time, but also establishes our narrator's interest in these matters as a personal inquiry³ into the nature of love, race and empire. Fortunately for him and the reader, the exiled Zanzibarian eventually sees clearly enough through the smoke of race and ideology⁴ to make this twin love story into a subtle and yet compelling commentary on the fortunes and disasters of colonial history.

The book is "Desertion" by Abdulrazak Gurnah. Our reviewer Alan Cheuse teaches writing at George Mason University in Fairfax, Virginia.