A maze of revenge in Somalia

Communal and familial interests in Mogadishu have been scrambled in ways that make it impossible to separate what's political from what's personal. Chaos in the streets, Jeebleh learns, reflects disorder in the home, which reverberates back into society with even more deadly effect. Not coincidentally, the Somali term for "civil war" translates roughly into "killing an intimate." For Jeebleh, still the pensive academic, this inspires a long consideration of the divisive or inclusive function of pronouns, the "we" or "them" that either reinforces clan unity or demonizes others.

As Jeebleh searches for his friend's niece, risking his life to pursue mysterious figures and venture down unknown paths, Farah turns the narrative into a kind of nightmare with that alternating feeling of familiarity and dislocation, compromised volition, and a frustrating sense that crucial information is just out of reach. Indeed, to enter this novel, we must become something like Jeebleh, repress our need for explanations, and resign ourselves to a murky cloud of suggestions and fears, a land simultaneously distinct and amorphous.

This is the slightly abstract, slightly surreal territory where several Nobel laureates hang out, writers like Singer, Márquez, and Saramago, and it's no coincidence that Farah has been held up in their company. He won the Neustadt International Prize in 1998, and his command of five languages and a lifetime spent in Africa, the United States, Europe, and India give his work a legendary quality even when the story concerns such a specific place and time.

Partly that effect stems from his penchant for African folklore, proverbs, and striking figures of speech. For instance, Jeebleh sees "the stars a-scatter like maize kernels thrown into greedy disarray by two hens quarreling." When he's worried, "his innards stir with the adrenaline of a daddy longlegs crawling out of a ditch a meter deep." And after Bile tells the dark story of his family's troubles, "his features take on the darker hue of fabric soaking overnight in water."

Like these strange and strangely self-evident descriptions, this whole story is both alien and familiar, a haunting exploration of the desire to help and the attendant costs of doing so.

The impulse to intervene, Farah suggests, is not evil or foolish or even exclusively American. But when Jeebleh rises with righteous determination to enter this fray, he learns that bitter American lesson about trying to "be good in a conscientious way in a city in which people are wicked and murderous through and through." As Emily Dickinson wryly observed, "Success in Circuit lies." To battle this vague enemy, Jeebleh finally realizes he must fight with the same side glances, altering his principles and permanently compromising his nature in ways he couldn't have anticipated. "No one," Bile tells him, "living in a country in which a civil war is raging is deemed to be innocent."

Near the end of his journey, Jeebleh thinks that his story is too woven into the "Dantean complexity" of others' stories to serve any "moral and political edification," but he's wrong.

• Ron Charles is the Monitor's book editor. Send e-mail comments about the book section toRon Charles.

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