I am going to admit here that upon publishing my sixth novel, I still don’t have a regimented process. I still feel panicked before I sit down to write. Sometimes, I think I will never write another book again and feel awful. Eventually, I get back to work. I find a way that works for me and for a little while I am happy. And then circumstances changes and I have to come up with a brand new way to work.
On Tonnelle Avenue in Jersey City, four lanes of traffic lurch under power lines, screeching and growling day and night, past a shuttered auto body shop covered in faded graffiti, a cargo truck repair facility, and a liquor store. It’s all cinder block structures until the corner of Manhattan Avenue, named Mario Costa Plaza. There, a white-paneled, circular building with a dotted red crown looks like it could light up and lift off into outer space — White Mana Diner.
The building was constructed for the 1939 World’s Fair in Flushing Meadows to showcase how you could cook, serve, and plate burgers without moving your pivot foot. That was a year before McDonald’s first opened. Louis Bridges bought the building and transported it to its current location in 1946. It still retains its charm because longtime owner Mario Costa hasn’t changed much, least of all himself.
Wry, strange, and generous, Murder by Memory is a fantastic series opener, with a vivid setting and intriguing characters that leave readers wanting more.
A storyteller of understated brilliance, Abdulrazak Gurnah was awarded the 2021 Nobel prize in literature for his “uncompromising and compassionate penetration of the effects of colonialism and the fate of the refugee in the gulf between cultures and continents”. Born in Zanzibar, Gurnah, now 76, moved to Britain in 1968 as a refugee of the Zanzibar revolution. His books often feature people who leave what they know and arrive “in strange places, carrying little bits of jumbled luggage and suppressing secret and garbled ambitions”, to use the words of a character from his 2001 novel By the Sea. Theft, Gurnah’s first book since his Nobel win, is in part a continued inquiry into familiar themes of exile and memory, home, longing and loneliness. It is also a poignant portrait of love, friendship and betrayal, set against Tanzania’s tourism boom during the 1990s.
In dramatising the difficulty of escaping the shadow of a past its protagonists can’t understand, Gurnah flirts with crushingly gloomy determinism as well as the sunnier possibilities of hope, and it’s not the least of this wonderful title’s achievements that it leaves you wondering to the very last which way he’s going to go.