Secrets
It is the week before the outbreak of the civil war in Somalia. Kalaman, a successful young businessman in Mogadiscio receives an unexpected house guest—the wild and sexually adventurous Sholoongo, his childhood crush returned from America. She announces that she intends to have his baby. Confronted by this dangerous interruption from his past, Kalaman starts to investigate his family's history, and uncovers the startling key to his own conception. Hailed by Salman Rushdie as "one of the...
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Secrets is set in Mogadiscio in the week before the official outbreak of the civil war. Society is collapsing under the weight of its own perversities, and the city itself is rattling with machine gun fire when the novel's main character, Kalaman, receives an unexpected house guest, his childhood crush returned from America to take him up on an old pledge. In this tempestuous political and social landscape, Farah turns loose his storytelling genius, which draws his readers through the rifts tearing across Somali society, deep into the culture and mind set of his troubled country and continent. The arrival of Kalaman's guest pulls him back into his past, back into a nest of stories and myths, of doubts and secrets - everything he thought he had escaped. Now, souls are bared and no memories sacred. Kalaman must watch his own coming of age story reveal itself as his family's multilayered tale of lost innocence. It is an exposition of a world that, for American readers, mixes the exotic with the surprisingly familiar. A world with much to teach about the effects of authoritarianism, about man's relationship to the natural world, about family, sex, and love.Kadija SesayThere is no doubt that Farah is master over his use of language. But he plays and lays it out in such a way he uses each word to explain every nuance and meaning possible. . . . While the book's first half may be most enjoyed by the author's most dedicated fans and literary image hunters willing to reach the second, Farah's Secrets does manage to evolve into as a fascinating story. -- Quarterly Black Review
\ Kadija SesayThere is no doubt that Farah is master over his use of language. But he plays and lays it out in such a way he uses each word to explain every nuance and meaning possible. . . . While the book's first half may be most enjoyed by the author's most dedicated fans and literary image hunters willing to reach the second, Farah's Secrets does manage to evolve into as a fascinating story. -- Quarterly Black Review\ \ \ \ \ Kirkus ReviewsThis intricate new novel, written in English by Somalian author Farah ("Maps", 1987, etc.), was recently awarded the 1998 Neustadt International Prize for Literature. The setting is Mogadiscio on the eve of Somalia's civil war, though the story begins a quarter century earlier in the village where its protagonist, Kalaman, enjoys a childhood blessed by the wisdom of his nurturing grandfather ("Nonno") and the precocious sexual attentions of an older girl, Sholoongo, who is, at various times, his companion, mentor, and tormentor. Then the narrative shifts to the approximate present day. Kalaman, now 33, owns his own computer company, but seems reluctant to marry his girlfriend and father a child, to the frustration of his importunate widowed mother, Damac. When Sholoongo returns home from America (where she became famous as a "shape-shifter" and practitioner of magic), expecting Kalaman to give her a child, the consequent tensions unearth buried "secrets" the several characters have long labored to conceal (which are disclosed in later chapters narrated, in turn, by Nonno, Damac, and Sholoongo). The novel is amazingly densely written; its principals' actions, thoughts, and emotions are rendered with superb clarity and thoroughness in an enthralling psychodrama that, obedient to Nonno's dictum that "it is in the nature of knots to come undone, and of buried things to be dug up by Time," reveals the connections drawing together a tale of a vengeful elephant stalking a man, a stolen birth certificate, a "secret marriage," and other shadowy matters, bringing painfully home to Kalaman the inextricable entwining of the personal and the political.\ \
