Fiction

Chance

A novel with a Conradian debt

by Andrew van der Vlies •

March 2025, no. 473

Theft by Abdulrazak Gurnah

Bloomsbury, $32.99 pb, 351 pp

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Fiction

Chance

A novel with a Conradian debt

by Andrew van der Vlies •

March 2025, no. 473

What’s in a novel’s epigraph – this one for example: ‘In a general way it’s very difficult for one to become remarkable’? We might read these words as an elliptical suggestion that the narrative we are about to encounter will raise the question of character. Perhaps we will witness one or more characters struggling to achieve something out of the ordinary – or struggling in entirely unremarkable ways, remaining unremarkable. Such is the stuff of much of the best fiction, after all, as well as the course of most lives.

Andrew van der Vlies

Andrew van der Vlies is Professor in the Department of English, Creative Writing, and Film at the University of Adelaide, and Interim Head of the School of Humanities there. A graduate of Rhodes University and the University of Oxford, he has published widely on South African and African literature and art, most recently Present Imperfect (Oxford, 2017) and, as an editor, Race, Nation, Translation (essays by Zoë Wicomb; Yale, 2018), South African Writing in Transition (Bloomsbury, 2019), The Bloomsbury Handbook to J. M. Coetzee (2023), and Olive Schreiner: Writing Networks and Global Contexts (Edinburgh, 2023).