The Gunny Sack

by M.G. Vassanji

Book Overview

Memory, Ji Bai would say, is this old sack here, this poor dear that nobody has any use for any more. As the novel begins, Salim Juma, in exile from Tanzania, opens up a gunny sack bequeathed to him... This description may be from another edition of this product.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0385660650
• ISBN13: 9780385660655
• Release Date: May 2005
• Publisher: Doubleday Canada
• Length: 352 Pages
• Weight: 0.73 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.8" x 5.0" x 8.0"

Customer Reviews

Beautifully written and funny

As an indian born in East Africa, I loved this book. The author writes beautifully and provides an accurate and insightful look into the culture of one particular group of Indians who were born and grew up in East Africa during the mid twentieth century.

Cross cultural linege in splendid form.

I was introduced to Vassanji while I was in my final year at university. He was being explored in Indian authors writing in english.Vassanji is a fantastic story teller, his prose is smooth and imbued with myth and the intricate patterns of the narrators lineage.The very title " gunny sack" promised much hertitage as it means a sack used for travelling. The author finds this and it is a metaphor for the discovery of his familial hertitage as he traces his ancestry from India to Africa.This book is great especially if you are of indian hertitage and have been displaced from your original homeland.