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Very good condition, soft cover.
Nuruddin Farah's intricate novel Secrets is a masterful exploration of post-colonial Somali identity and was awarded the 1998 Neustadt International Prize for Literature.
The story is set in Mogadishu on the eve of Somalia's civil war, beginning a quarter century earlier in the village where the protagonist, Kalaman, enjoys a childhood shaped by his nurturing grandfather ("Nonno") and the precocious attentions of an older girl, Sholoongo. As the narrative shifts to the present day, Kalaman, now 33, owns a computer company but seems reluctant to marry his girlfriend and have a child, much to the frustration of his widowed mother, Damac.
When Sholoongo returns from America, where she became famous as a "shape-shifter" and practitioner of magic, expecting Kalaman to give her a child, the resulting tensions unearth long-buried secrets that the characters have concealed. Farah's writing is remarkably dense, with the characters' actions, thoughts, and emotions rendered with clarity and thoroughness in an enthralling psychodrama.
The novel reveals connections between a vengeful elephant stalking a man, a stolen birth certificate, a "secret marriage," and other shadowy matters, painfully showing Kalaman the inextricable entwining of the personal and the political. Haunting scraps of tribal wisdom, animal fables, riddles, and parables blend seamlessly with Farah's incisive analytical prose, creating a genuinely disturbing mystery that extends literary and philosophical referents to make postcolonial Somali culture part of a cosmopolitan discourse.
