Secrets (Fine First Edition)

Set against the backdrop of the civil war in Somalia, SECRETS is a stunning, revelatory novel by Somali writer Nuruddin Farah, the author of several acknowledged classics of modern African fiction. Teeming with myth and metaphor, SECRETS goes deep into the culture and mind-set of a continent and reveals a world that is a stimulating mix of the exotic and the familiar. Farah writes in English and is called a true master of the language.

This 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 mattersbringing painfully home to Kalaman the inextricable entwining of the personal and the political (. . . because all of us are holding our trump cards close to our chests, we can never know how best to serve this nation). Haunting scraps of tribal wisdom, animal fables, riddles, and parables blend seamlessly with the author's incisive analytical prose: a novel that's a genuineand genuinely disturbingmystery. -- Copyright ©1998, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.

In this new novel from the author of Close Sesame, Sardines, and Sweet and Sour Milk (all LJ 5/15/92), Farah tells the story of Kalaman, a young Somali man who seems plagued by the secrets of his childhood sexual acts. His former childhood infatuation, Sholoongo, appears at his apartment one day, and all the memories of what they did together overwhelm him. The author attempts to tie the problems of Kalaman and his family to those of modern-day Somalia, but the result is disjointed and hard to follow. At one point early on, Kalaman's father tells his son that Sholoongo is "as cheap as a popular rag dishing out pornography in the sophisticated idiom of a highbrow program," a comment that seems to sum up the whole novel. Not recommended.?Lisa Rohrbaugh, East Palestine Memorial P.L., OH
Copyright 1998 Reed Business Information, Inc.

Kalaman is a successful Somalian businessman. At nearly 30, he owns his own computer firm and spends his spare time with his current girlfriend, Talaado. But his life is disrupted completely when his first love, Sholoongo, reenters his life, asking that he father her child. Appalled, Kalaman asks his family for advice, becomes enmeshed in family intrigue, and learns of lies of omission, deliberate indirections, discreet confidences, and hidden truths concerning his own childhood. He comes to question his identity, his sanity, and his understanding of his family. Paranoiac and voyeuristic, sexually charged and profoundly sinister, Secrets compellingly limns the social and biological structure of a family and the ways in which truth and lies both support that structure. It explores the limitations that secrets impose and the ways in which they ultimately reveal themselves, despite the intentions of their keepers. Farah is the author of several other novels, including Sweet and Sour Milk (1992), Sardines (1992), and Close Sesame (1992). Bonnie Johnston