M. G. Vassanji was born in Kenya and raised in Tanzania. He attended the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and was writer-in-residence at the University of Iowa in the International Writing Program. He is the winner of the Giller Prize, the Bressani Literary Prize, the Regional Commonwealth Prize, and the Harbourfront Festival Prize. He lives in Toronto.
"Rich . . . wonderful . . . entertaining . . . a celebration of storytelling." --David Willis McCullough, The New York Times Book Review "A love affair with the past . . . [an] exquisite, tender, and possibly great novel." --The New Yorker "Well-written, mulit-layered, and teasingly inconclusive . . . Offers a view of an area seldom treated in fiction." --The Atlantic Monthly
"Rich . . . wonderful . . . entertaining . . . a celebration of storytelling." --David Willis McCullough, The New York Times Book Review "A love affair with the past . . . [an] exquisite, tender, and possibly great novel." --The New Yorker "Well-written, mulit-layered, and teasingly inconclusive . . . Offers a view of an area seldom treated in fiction." --The Atlantic Monthly
After his initial examination of the "book of secrets," a fragment of a diary by a turn-of-the-century colonial official stationed in a remote outpost in British East Africa, the narrator, Pius Fernandes, soon loses his scientific objectivity as he finds himself continuing the story that this diary begins. In the prolog, he writes: "Because it has no end, this book, it ingests us and carries us with it, and so it grows." The diary has a life of its own, creating or rewriting history as the vagaries of its contents raise unanswerable questions for its readers that then shape the future direction of their lives. Fernandes finds himself reexamining his own life as an immigrant, comparing his own experiences with those of the colonial official, finding his own recent past connected to the more distant past represented in the diary, and reconsidering certain important relationships, the memories of which resurfaced because of his efforts to solve the diary's conundrums. The many layers of Vassanji's award-winning novel cannot be addressed here. A work of art, it well deserves Canada's GillerPrize, of which it is the first recipient. Highly recommended for all libraries without exception.‘Rebecca Stuhr-Rommereim, Grinnell Coll. Libs., Ia.
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