Country of Eternal Forgetting

Is there any Canadian writer who contemplates the meaning of time with greater distinction and intellectual grace than M.G. Vassanji? Guided by nostalgia, instinct and an accumulation of residual proofs—documents, diaries, photos, furniture, shards of memory—he reconstructs a cultural history that is not merely past, but virtually extinct. From his earliest novels, he has exhibited a preoccupation with the notion of historical preservation. His book The Gunny Sack, which received the 1990 Commonwealth Writers Prize, features a hero who uses family heirlooms to resurrect the little known history of Indians in East Africa. In The Book of Secrets, which earned Vassanji the first of his two Giller prizes, a retired history teacher in Dar es Salaam pieces together the colonial past of an Asian village in Kenya. Throughout the novel, the teacher, Fernandes, repeatedly asks: “Does anybody care about history?”

Vassanji himself did not give the subject...