The search for peace in a place of war

Nuruddin's 10th novel follows a Somali expat an on unlikely mission to her homeland.

from the February 27, 2007 edition

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His earlier novel "Link" is intended, with "Knots," to make up the first parts of a trilogy. Several characters overlap, most notably Bile, who becomes a love interest for Cambara (in one of the least convincing developments of the story).

Nuruddin, who today lives in South Africa, writes in English even though it is not his first language. (He speaks five, claiming Somali as his native tongue.) The result is a uniquely textured prose style.

In places, the language in "Knots" is sharply descriptive. ("Her voice, even if raised, remain[ed] soft in the peripheries and hard at the center like calluses rasping on sandpaper.") Elsewhere it exudes a slightly clumsy type of charm. ("Arda segued into a song, in which the word 'love' chimed not with stars shining most brightly but with the notion 'ruse.')

Occasionally, however, Nuruddin's attempts at American colloquialisms are just plain jarring. ("She finds it hard to picture ever having had the hots for him.")

"Knots" has its awkward moments. And Western readers may find it hard to accept some plot twists, including the ease with which Cambara, mourning her own son, picks up a couple of substitutes. ("He is no one's son," she is told of a 10-year-old boy she decides to take home.)

But that is also part of the story's richness. It sends non-Somali readers to a place and set of circumstances unimaginable elsewhere in the world. And yet, somehow (as in a scene in which gun- slinging boy warriors are unnerved when asked to kill a chicken for lunch), Nuruddin reduces his country's trauma to a scale we can almost grasp. "One may be lulled into believing that everything is normal," Cambara thinks.

It's not, of course. But such a world does really exist, and the fact that Nuruddin allows us to experience this – even glancingly – is an achievement in itself.

• Marjorie Kehe is the Monitor's book editor. Send comments to Marjorie Kehe

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