LONDON — Leaning over the balcony of a council estate,
Gabriel Krauze watched as the police gathered in front of an apartment door and
prepared to smash it in.
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The officers were actors filming a television show, but the
scene wasn’t so different from ones Krauze, 35, witnessed growing up in this
public housing development.
“When I was living here, the amount of raids I’d see, or
just the amount of incidents where the police would come and tape off bits of
the estate,” he said. “Like, just there,” Krauze added, pointing toward one
apartment block, “a girl got killed a couple years back.” The TV crew was in
fact a good sign, he said, suggesting the area was “calming down a bit.”
Krauze, who has the name of his debut book tattooed on his
hand, is an anomaly in British publishing — a novelist whose life and work is
steeped in a side of London that many writers don’t know about or acknowledge.
His novel “
Who They Was” — published by Fourth Estate in
Britain last year and longlisted for the Booker Prize, one of the most
prestigious literary awards in the world — is a barely fictionalized,
first-person account of his late teens and early 20s. At the time, he was living
in Blake Court, a tower named for William Blake that is part of the South
Kilburn estate in northwest London. (In Zadie Smith’s 2012 novel, “NW,” a
fictional estate is set in the same area, with tower blocks named for
philosophers.)
“Who They Was,” which Bloomsbury is releasing in the United
States on Tuesday, is heavy on London slang — people get shanked, not stabbed,
and everyone’s “bare loud and aggi.” It starts with a character named Snoopz
trying to steal a woman’s diamond ring (“I always thought if you break
someone’s finger you’ll actually feel the bones break, hear it even, but I
don’t feel anything at all, it’s like folding paper”), then documents Snoopz’s
life, including stabbing a drug addict in the head and breaking his favorite
knife in the process, fighting with young upstarts and going to prison.
There are breaks from the violence, as Krauze’s character
completes an English degree on the other side of London, hangs out with friends
and escapes back to his parents’ house, but reviewers have pointed out that
there is little optimism.
“That is, I suppose, the only honest way to tell the story,”
Jake Kerridge wrote in The Daily Telegraph.
“I had to have a shower after I read it,” Lemn Sissay, a
poet and Booker Prize judge, said in a telephone interview. “I never heard this
world spoken in this way before,” he added.
“It’s not trying to give excuses, it’s not trying to
contextualize the underclass. It’s saying, ‘This is what it is.’”
Douglas Stuart, who won last year’s Booker for “Shuggie
Bain,” his debut novel about working-class life, said in a phone interview,
“When you read these worlds in books, it’s normally by a middle-class writer
who creates a one-dimensional villain, but Gabriel’s created a world so rich in
detail, and motivation and consequence.”
Krauze insisted that the book is far more than a lurid tale.
“It’s a moral confrontation with the reader,” he said,
contending that it forces readers to realize that some people commit crime
because of their psychology, as well as poverty or a lack of opportunity.
The author’s note in some editions of the book is clearer
still. “This is the life I chose,” he writes. “Maybe I was looking for a sense
of family and identity that I couldn’t find at home. Maybe it’s the way I found
my people and they found me.”
Krauze was born in northwest London to a newspaper
cartoonist and a painter who had both immigrated from Poland. He grew up around
the corner from the South Kilburn estate, in an apartment where his twin
brother practiced violin for hours a day. He became obsessed with books as a
child, devouring everything from Tolkien to nonfiction about World War I, and
realized that he wanted to become a writer by the time he was 13.
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