The Magic of Saida
*Starred Review* Vassanji’s (The Assassin’s Song, 2007) remarkable new novel is a magic trick that reveals how it’s performed while in process. It has an old-fashioned, Conradian narrative construct: while recovering from malaria or madness, Kamal Punja, the befuddled protagonist, tells his story to Martin Kigoma, a publisher who may well be an unreliable narrator. And the story is complex. Kamal is a golo, or half-caste, the son of an Indian father and an African mother who was raised in Kilwa, a coastal backwater in colonial Tanzania. He escaped and found success as a doctor in Edmonton, Canada. What may or may not be an ordinary midlife crisis has brought him back to his origins, and led him to track down his first love, an African girl named Saida. As Kamal relates the colonial history—the successive waves of occupation, degradation, resistance, and modernization of his beloved Kilwa and its surroundings—Vassanji’s tactile, occasionally sentimental prose amounts to the best sort of historical fiction because the history is integral to the story. Once the trick is completed, the magic must be shown for what it is: tragedy. Vassanji has won Canada’s Giller Prize twice. This book also seems bound for glory. --Michael Autrey