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A review by punkrocknreticence
The Book of Secrets by M.G. Vassanji
4.0
This novel is a complex diasporic text in the truest sense of the world - be it in the authorial sense, or in terms of its characters: Pius Fernandes, Alfred Corbin, Richard Gregory, Rita, and the likes. As stated somewhere in its own midst, it can be referred to as a "book of half lives, partial truths, conjecture, interpretation, and perhaps even some mistakes". It is, of course, masterfully a lot more than that.
The Book of Secrets revolves around its own namesake, a diary belonging to a colonial English official in East Africa. With this diary, many lives are connected and intertwined, for better and for worse. Throughout its expanse of three hundred odd pages, Vassanji's novel explores a domain left quite untouched in most literature even as it were a prized dominion of colonial conquest. Retired schoolteacher Pius Fernandes' travails to reconstruct the fragmented history of lives within and without Tanzania's Shamsi community explore history in a layered and evocative form. Haunted by the memory of Mariamu, this book is host to many dearly held secrets - some unraveled, and some unsaid.
I perhaps would never have picked up this novel were it not for the university syllabus, but now I am sure that it will call me to read it over and again. One has to credit Vassanji for his pure literary genius in crafting a masterpiece so delicately balanced in terms of intrigue and yield, as well as in terms of history and fiction - which, arguably, is the very substance of the lives of which this book tries to speak.
A wonderful read.
The Book of Secrets revolves around its own namesake, a diary belonging to a colonial English official in East Africa. With this diary, many lives are connected and intertwined, for better and for worse. Throughout its expanse of three hundred odd pages, Vassanji's novel explores a domain left quite untouched in most literature even as it were a prized dominion of colonial conquest. Retired schoolteacher Pius Fernandes' travails to reconstruct the fragmented history of lives within and without Tanzania's Shamsi community explore history in a layered and evocative form. Haunted by the memory of Mariamu, this book is host to many dearly held secrets - some unraveled, and some unsaid.
I perhaps would never have picked up this novel were it not for the university syllabus, but now I am sure that it will call me to read it over and again. One has to credit Vassanji for his pure literary genius in crafting a masterpiece so delicately balanced in terms of intrigue and yield, as well as in terms of history and fiction - which, arguably, is the very substance of the lives of which this book tries to speak.
A wonderful read.