Desertion by Abdulrazak Gurnah

     "The radio has broken down and we can get no news. The water has been cut off for most of the day because something has broken down in the pumping station. We no longer know how to make things work. We don't know how to make anything for ourselves, not anything we use or desire, not even a bar of soap or a packet of razor blades. How did we allow ourselves to get into this state ?" 

     This quote doesn't really represent what the book is really about, but still : simple stories, seeming extraordinary love stories but common at the same time, all involving caracters who "desert" their social environment, leading to both failure and victory. But more than the stories, what made me read it to the end is the writing in itself : it's so elegant and beautiful, always avoiding heaviness or boredom, it describes everything in such a just way ... It makes me think of the old classics of english litterature, these books that you couldn't help reading for the simple pleasure of the word more than the stories that were so plain, if not downright boring. Except that here the writing comes from elsewhere, from Zanzibar and Kenya, and it gives an internal foreign touch to the english language that you can't quite locate that makes it "new" and even nicer to read (to me at least), the writing of someone who masters to peferction the english language and culture and who can smoothly enhance all this with somehting else ...

     Livre traduit récemment en français me semble-t-il sous le nom de "adieu zanzibar". Je me demande ce que donne la traduction, tant l'écriture en anglais est magnifique, c'est d'ailleurs elle, plus que l'histoire, qui m'a tenu en haleine. Ecriture toujours élégante, juste, qui évite les lourdeurs et les envolées lyriques inutiles, et l'auteur lui même  arrive à nous faire oublier tout les clichés possibles sur le sujet du colonialisme, de l'islam, des ehtnies, des exilés divers ... On ne s'occupe finalement que de ces personnages et de leurs histoires si courantes à travers le monde.

لا اعرف ان هذا الكتاب مترجم الى العربية: "ترك" (ربما هذا الترجمة من العنوان غير صحيحة) 

قصات خلال الاسعمار في زانزيبار ومومباسا عن اشخاص يتركون عاداتهم وما يتعودون عنه ويجعلوهم الى الفشل والنجاح في آن واحد. قصات عادية تقريبا ولكن الكتابة معجبة وجميلة وتجعلك تقرأ حتى النهاية ... احب كثيرا المؤلفين الذين يستوعدون الثقافة الانكليزية واللغة الانكليزية بشكل كامل وهم من عالم آخر (الهند، او الشرق الاوسط او افريقية مثل هذا الكاتب) : كتابتهم معجبة ومعينة مع ان لا تعرف ماذا بالضبط هو مختلف.