MAPS is a superb book--lyrical, experimental, moving, memorable. Since reading MAPS a few years ago, I root for Farah each October when they're about to announce the Nobel laureates.LINKS, however, seems like it was written by a different person. It's clunky, talky, lifeless. I couldn't wait for it to be over.An exile arrives in his hometown of Magadiscio for the first time in twenty years, returning to the wartorn city for reasons that are never quite convincing. The first thing he witnesses is a child being randomly shot in the head by a gun-toting adolescent playing a marksmanship game. Yet though this early event sets the tone that the city is lawless and terrifying, the main character continues to freely walk around pissing people off and putting his life in jeopardy, apparently believing himself to be invincible. Farah never quite explains how such a setting could exist--if everyone wants Jeeblah dead, and if there really wouldn't be any consequences to killing him, then why aren't they able to just shoot him down? And is wishing to visit his mother's grave really reason enough for him to risk his own life when he has a family waiting for and depending on him in the United States? I'm not saying the situations Farah presents are impossible--they simply don't make sense to me as they are presented. Instead of character psychology, we get symbol-heavy dreams or pages-long political conversations with details pulled from newspaper articles. The occasional motivation or emotion that we get seems injected into the story merely out of necessity, with no consideration for logic or storytelling momentum.It seems to me that Farah really wanted to write a nonfiction essay on the current state of Somalia, but instead of simply doing that he cobbled together a few one-dimensional characters, put them into a confusing and illogical plot, and had them spend most of their time sitting around talking politics in a diction that real people never use when speaking (the expository "I did [such-and-such], as is customary in traditional Somalian culture..." is an oft-repeated refrain, similar to if an American writer were to write, "I told him 'God Bless You,' as is typical in the English-speaking world after someone has sneezed").It's always nice to learn a thing or two about another culture, but I do not recommend this book.
Set during the mid-1990s, Links sheds light on the lurid status of famished Mogadiscio, Somalia, a city where government itself is obsolete, allowing Dagaalka sokeeye, or civil war, to rage madly on. The novel's protagonist, Jeebleh, is visiting his native Somalia for the first time in twenty years in order to settle his mother’s burial and funeral, and he is jaded by the circumstances plaguing his homeland. Clan-based war persists between two major clans, with Strongman South’s clan leading the charge. Jeebleh immediately reenters a violent landscape where collateral damage is the norm. Upon his return, Jeebleh feels disoriented and alienated and wonders how he can possibly continue to love a land he no longer recognizes. He is in fact attempting to become a citizen of the world by returning to his homeland to make peace and to help his family-friends who have experienced the tragic kidnappings of their beloved daughters. Despite Jeebleh’s good intentions, however, he has entered a structure that he was once a part of and becomes sucked into the harshness of the environment. He faces an identity crisis that he may be incapable of resolving at a crossroads moment in his life. As a whole, Links is both realistic and deeply moving. The novel's greatest strengths rest in the desolate, war-torn Somalian landscape that Farah vividly paints, as well as his raising of issues of global citizenship and human dignity that haunt the victims of collateral damage. Unfortunately, Farah's awkward use of language almost takes away from the novel's poignant message. Farah opted to write this novel in English, which is not his first language, instead of utilizing his normal method of writing and then having the novel translated. This resulted in repetitive metaphors and recycled plot descriptions throughout the novel. Nonetheless, the portrait that Farah manages to create is powerful enough to transport readers to Jeebleh's world...and mind.
What do You think about Links (2005)?
Bizarrement c’est au western et au roman noir que ce livre m’a fait penser. L’étranger qui revient dans sa ville natale avec des motifs cachés, et doit faire face à des gangs (enfin, ici des clans), rencontre un shérif/policier hargneux quand il arrive en ville, c’est typiquement les codes du roman de genre. Alors quand par la suite survient un enlèvement…Mais c’est surtout une description de la Somalie déchirée par la guerre civile avec une violence omniprésente, et l’absence d’Etat qui laisse la place aux clans familiaux.
—Veterini
Nuruddin Farah’s “Links” has an odd rhythm, building slowly and then dashing madly, even haphazardly, to the finish. Although, Farah’s touchstone is the Inferno, from which he quotes in epigraphs, this novel set in Somalia has more of intra-familial savagery of Greek tragedy, as half-brothers, Jebreel, returning from the United States, the long-imprisoned Bile, and the brutal gangster Caloosha circle around each other. A young niece, daughter of a half-sister, is missing with her friend. Ambiguous and dangerous characters lurk around the edges: the sinister brother-in-law; Af Laawe, whose non-profit has a stated purpose of burying the dead in the quick but clean Muslim manner but may be a front for organ-harvesting; the elders who say they are visiting Jebreel to welcome him but actually covet his American dollars to keep up their armored SUVs in competition with other clans; the leaders of the warring clans, here called Strongman North and Strongman South. For all the violence of Somali against Somali, the death of the American soldiers in the “Black Hawk Down” incident lingers in the background, but from the Somalian perspective. Throughout Farah meditates on what it means to come from a land that cannot really be called a country. “Is a whole country responsible for the crime of one of its citizens?” Jeebleh asks of the United States, but the same could be asked of what remains of Somalia. This is a country whose greatest poet wrote, as Farah quotes him, “All you can get from me is War./If you want peace, go away from my Country.” Farah sets up his mean streets down which Jeebleh must walk and populates it with traps, duplicity and danger to himself and to the innocent missing girls and then for some reason suddenly resolves it with the off-stage death of Caloosha and the miraculous re-appearance of the missing girls. If only it were that way in reality.
—Nick
Not that it was terrible- I just wasn't feeling it all that much. I like highly metaphorical language and Farah kind of overdid it more than a few times. The pace of the novel was fast enough, the characters were interesting but not drawn conclusively. It had a lost of epigraphs and I LOVE epigraphs. I was reading it for class, against the clock, admittedly, but I don't really have any desire to check it out again.It was good to read something from and about Somalia, though. maybe I'll have to check on this elsewhere...
—matt
