Paradise. London: Penguin, 1994.

ABDULRAZAK GURNAH (b.1948)
Paradise. London: Penguin, 1994.
First edition, annotated with 426 words on 22 pages, with a typescript, 7 pages, of Gurnah's Nobel Prize lecture, signed and dated 21 March 2022. Gurnah's fourth novel, Paradise is a coming of age novel set in Tanzania in the early decades of the 20th century, and recounts the story of Yusuf, a 12-year old boy whose father pawns him into unpaid service for a rich Arab merchant, Aziz: the novel follows Aziz's trading caravan into the interior west of Lake Tanganyika, setting the complexities of pre-colonial East Africa against the irruption of European colonialism with the outset of World War I. Paradise was shortlisted for the Booker, the Whitbread and the Writers' Guild prizes: Gurnah was awarded the 2021 Nobel Prize in Literature 'for his uncompromising and compassionate penetration of the effects of colonialism and the fates of the refugee in the gulf between cultures and continents'. Gurnah's annotations range from the etymological (noting that the word 'paradise' comes from the 'old Iranian for a wall enclosing a garden') to the personal, noting where episodes are based on personal experience, or in one instance that 'I wrote this episode ... during a Faculty Board meeting, pretending to take notes'. A longer note on the endpapers records that the recruiting drive episode at the end had originally been planned as 'the beginning of the novel about WW1 in eastern Africa' before Gurnah's focus shifted to 'a novel about the arrival and imposition of European rule ... and the transformation of people and places as seen from the point of view of the overwhelmed'. The accompanying typescript of Gurnah's Nobel Prize lecture records his early memories of reading and writing, and the beginnings of his creative career when the record of troubled memories of his early years became also a way of confronting the 'new, simpler history' that was being created to replace the complexities of the past.

Octavo. Original blue cloth, spine lettered in gilt, pictorial dust jacket.

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