Knots

Past Imperfect #2

by Nuruddin Farah

Book by Farah, Nuruddin

Genres: Fiction, Africa, Somalia, African Literature, Feminism, Contemporary, Novels

735 pages, Hardcover

First published January 1, 2007

About the author

Nuruddin Farah (Somali: Nuuradiin Faarax, Arabic: نور الدين فرح‎) is a prominent Somali novelist. Farah has garnered acclaim as one of the greatest contemporary writers in the world, his prose having earned him accolades including the Premio Cavour in Italy, the Kurt Tucholsky Prize in Sweden, the Lettre Ulysses Award in Berlin, and in 1998, the prestigious Neustadt International Prize for Literature. In the same year, the French edition of his novel Gifts won the St Malo Literature Festival's prize. In addition, Farah is a perennial nominee for the Nobel Prize in Literature.

Reviews

[Meaghan · Rating 2 out of 5]

Meh. I just could not get into this book. The characters neither acted nor sounded like real people. They all talked the same way and all made long speeches with big words -- even the character Gacal, who I think was only about ten years old. Cambara, the protagonist, goes to Somalia to escape a horrible marriage, grieve her dead son and reclaim her family's property which has been taken by a warlord. She shows up and right away half of Mogadishu comes to her saying, "We will help you! We will do anything you want, at risk of our lives, and you won't have to pay us! In fact, we'll even foot your bills! You can do whatever you want, no matter how strange it seems, and no one will ask you any questions! You can even go to your family property, get a plumber to make improvements, and take the warlord's pregnant girlfriend to the hospital, and she won't even inquire who the heck you are and what are you doing in her house! And then she will conveniently disappear from the story, never to be mentioned again!"

Cambara also pulls two random urchins off the street and basically adopts them -- which I can buy, given the recent loss of her son -- and miraculously they both turn out to be good, sweet, well-behaved boys who only needed a bath and a change of clothes to become normal children. This in spite of the fact that one of the boys is a child soldier and the other has been living on the streets of Mogadishu for two years.

I do not understand why Nuruddin Farah is so highly regarded as an author. Perhaps his other books are better than this?

[Kelly · Rating 1 out of 5]

Kelly picks up this book at the U library because the author will be a visiting professor there in the fall. It was already on her list, this seems like the time.

From the get go, she is a little put off by the voice. It's third person present, narrating the activity as it happens. She always hates this kind of voice--she used to have a friend who wrote all of her short stories like this. Seeing another author use this voice, now Kelly knows why her friend's stuff was so annoying.

Cambara, the protagonist of this novel, returns to Mogadishu after decades in Canada. She stays with her foster brother/cousin/ex-husband in a rundown house. Civil war rages around them. This makes no sense. She has big plans to repo a family house she has never lived in. Huh? Not until page 210 does Kelly get a sense of why she is there; it involves puppets.

The word "slog" keeps coming to Kelly's mind as she reads this. She knows she could have been reading so many other novels this summer. Finally, she realizes that life is too short. She returns the book to the library, unfinished.

[jo · Rating 4 out of 5]

this is a tough one, because in sprawl, vision, and story construction this novel is great and it kept me mesmerized all the way through (and it's a long one!); but the writing is so infuriatingly sloppy... ugh. my best guess is that someone was in a hurry to put this out, and no one had time to go over it and edit it. many sentences are simply atrocious -- really badly written. this is by anyone's standards. just open the book at random and you are basically guaranteed to come across one of them. but farah has such an absurd gift for storytelling, i found the slog worth it anyway. after a while i grew to like the language, too, especially when the choice of word was so out of place (you can kind of tell what word he meant to use instead of the one on the page) that it's actually interesting. on some other occasions, you know farah *meant* to use a specific word, bizarre as it is used in that context, and that makes his language at the very least whimsical and maybe brilliant (it is certainly brilliant in _Links_, a much shorter, tighter, better-written book).

i read a review somewhere in which a critic claimed that farah doesn't know english well because he started using it only in the 60s. dude, the 60s were forty years ago! this critic, of course, had not read any other novels by farah and so didn't know that in them the language is also idiosyncratic but by no means incompetent.

_Knots_ is a fairy tale about conquering barbarism by sheer force of civilization. well, not really, because the forces of civilization make quite abundant use of violence, though the violence is only alluded to, never shown. this is one of the dilemmas of the book (and it is explicitly voiced by the protagonist on quite a few occasions): the compromises we are forced to embrace to make the world better. it's all pretty dirty out there, even when we are mercifully spared the sight of it.

but, with blood safely out of sight, idealism wins the day and art, friendship, compassion, and solidarity triumph over the dark forces of moral and civic dissipation. i especially like how friendship and moral bonds come to substitute clans as forces around which people coalesce with one another and keep each other safe.

if this sounds a bit too easy, it is. i said this is a fairy tale. and an uneasy one it is, too. there's a lot of cash thrown around by our various heroes, and a lot of influence, and, clearly, the assumption is that wealth won't hurt if you plan to reconquer ground lost to mayhem. but i didn't mind. there are bad characters and good characters, and the bad characters are really bad -- repulsive, irredeemable, unbearable. they are weak, smelly, petty, vicious, lost. the good characters, though, are almost saintly and you grow to love them. maybe it'll be difficult for someone to love them, they are so steeped in contradiction, but i don't mind contradiction and i loved them.

this is the most feminist book written by a man i have ever read, and that electrified me. he places all the blame for the bloody, meaningless somali civil war squarely on the shoulders of men, no qualification necessary.

at the end of the day, i felt hopeful for this world of ours. maybe farah wanted to show us that there are somali people in the world who know what it is to be good, refined, intelligent, sophisticated, and unbelievably good. maybe he used his bad characters as a metaphor for the sorry state his country is in, and his good characters as a metaphor for redemption and hope. it worked for me.

[Jonathan · Rating 2 out of 5]

The writing was choppy. If you've ever been in a boat on stormy waters...

So I decided, 30 pages in, that I was going to speed read. That helped. There is an adequate story underneath the writing and the author depicts some deep relational and emotional situations.

The narration was odd. The main character, Cambara, seemed to be unstable, just a tad. And it was difficult to enjoy her voice at times because of this emotional or mental instability. An odd character.

But I enjoyed getting a picture, however fictionalized it may have been, of the state of Somalia, and more specifically, Mogadishu.

But the writing was odd. Too many adjectives? Metaphors? Similes? I don't know. He used weird words to communicate the story in places. I need to read some of his other stuff.

[Sandy · Rating 1 out of 5]

Although it's always interesting to delve into other cultures, this was ultimately frustrating and disappointing. The writing style was oddly formal and awkward, and the characters' motivations perplexing and inconsistent. Even the main character's reasons for returning to Somalia didn't make any sense -- why would a woman seeking to start a new life go to a place where women have so little power or control? Her tenuous connection to the country, and her feelings towards her initial host made her choices and expectations absurd. And accomplishing her goals merely by asking others to help her was pushing believability past its bounds.

[Amanda · Rating 1 out of 5]

I found this book extremely hard to stomach. As a woman, I found the author's thoughts regarding what it means to be a woman and a woman's inner thoughts completely off base and at times degrading. On the other hand, this based-on-fact and-history book was a porthole to a previously unaccessible Somali world.

[Beth · Rating 3 out of 5]

So much of this story is the unfolding of what is in the mind of Cambara. Ater her son dies, she returns to Somalia where she was born in order to find herself and grieve. From dreams to thoughts, we struggle through her decisions. For so much mulling over, she makes ones that turn out lucky but from my point of view, makes them without considering consequences. Too much that happens seems like she is blessed with luck. She gets help immediately even though her first former husband is chewing Quat constantly. She makes a new friend who gives her free rent and food in the hotel and helps her have car rides and security during Modadiseios uprising when anyone else would have been killed. She gathers youngsters and older men who serve as surrogate children and love her and everything turns out right. She puts on her first play. That seems the weirdest. In a country that does not permit images of real things, her play requires that the youngsters act as chicken and eagle. This took a long time to read. Based on truth but a little far fetched perhaps.

[Parastou · Rating 2 out of 5]

I feel odd giving 2 stars to a writer as acclaimed as Nuruddin Farah. Its the first book of his I've ever read and I'm assuming his other works are better. I was quite disappointed in this book, which is about a Somali-Canadian woman who returns to Mogadishu to reclaim her family property from a warlord. Maybe I'm missing something, but the book just didn't impress me or have the sort of depth I was hoping for. Has anyone else read it? What did you think? Can anyone recommend another book by him they really liked?

[Colleen · Rating 1 out of 5]

I used to think that if I started a book I had to finish it. This was one of those books I just couldn't get into. I think I was about 80 pages in when I quit. I didn't really care about the characters, and found I was forcing myself to read on. I've heard good things about this author, so it could just be that I have too much on my mind right now....

[Jo M. F. · Rating 1 out of 5]

I am currently still reading this although I started it a while ago because I could not get into the story at all. The writing is dense and was hard to follow. I will give it another try some time when my powers of concentration are better. This is not a book to read in bed at night when you are getting sleepy.

[Kevin · Rating 4 out of 5]

Love the play within the play element of this book, the second in a trilogy about Somali Diaspora returning to Mogadishu. The narrator needs to reconcile feelings about the loss of her son, killed in Toronto rather than Mogadishu, by trying to save the wild and destructive youth of Mogadishu through theater.

[Damien Travel · Rating 4 out of 5]

Somalia. For most, this country’s name conjures images of hunger, civil war, militiamen perched behind a machine gun on the back of a pick-up, terrorist attacks and piracy. When 25 years ago I landed in Hargeisa, I didn’t know much what to expect. I knew that the capital of Somaliland was different than Mogadishu and that the Northern part of the country lived in relative peace, despite the lack of international recognition. Still, I was a little bit anxious as I arrived. The airport would have deserved the old name of « airfield ». During the approach, a long strip of earth could be seen in a pasture that looked more or less flat on the city’s outskirts. The immigration office where my passport received its « Entry » and « Exit » stamps was just a military tent at the end of the airstrip.
I stayed for 2-3 days and everything was calm and peaceful, even if the city still showed some of the traces of the battles and destructions of 1991. The commercial activities were typical of a mid-size African town: shops with metal doors open, women walking to the market in their colorful dresses, schools receiving their first computers.
I recently read the « Past Imperfect » trilogy written by Somali author Nuruddin Farah. It includes three parts: « Links », « Knots » et « Crossbones». Even if the novelist doesn’t hide any of his country’s violence and drama, Farah’s three books open a window to discover a Somali society richer and more complex than the clichés repeated by the media.
In « Links », Jeebleh, a Somali academic exiled in New-York where he married an American, comes back after many years in Mogadishu following his mother’s death. During his arrival at the airport, a gang of idle young militiamen have some fun in shooting at a family boarding a plane. A young boy dies. Jeebleh needs to learn how to navigate this city divided in two by the factions of the two rival warlords. He reunites with Bileh, his childhood friend, who like him, was a political prisoner and is now in charge of a refuge for orphans and abandoned children. But he also needs to mistrust Caloosha, Bileh’s half-brother who is the leader of a gang involved in all kinds of traffics.
With the second volume, « Knots », it is Cambara, a young woman who debarks in Mogadishu from her exile in Toronto and tries to recover the family house, squatted by a warlord. The city is somewhat more peaceful, but Cambara needs to have an armed escort each time she goes somewhere. Her protector is Dajaal, one of Bileh’s friends. Thanks to their help and the assistance of other friends, she writes a play that she puts on for a women’s network who tries to reestablish peace.
The third and last tome of the trilogy brings us to a more recent period. The Union of Islamic Court brings order in Mogadishu, young Somalis from Minnesota come to swell the ranks of the Shabaab extremists, while further North, in Puntland, pirates ransom merchant vessels in the Gulf of Aden. Two brothers, Malik and Ahl, arrive from the United States. Malik is a journalist who dreams of a scoop about modern piracy. He is accompanied by his father-in-law, Jeebleh, who introduces him in a circle of old friends, including Bileh and Cambara. They fell in love and live together, but without being married, a fact that irks the Islamic Courts. Ahl is in Puntland where he looks for his stepson Taxliil, a young Somali recruited by the Islamists in Shabaab, but who could actually be aboard a pirate embarkation. This way, he finds out about the links uniting Islamists and pirates. He also learns that the piracy along the Somali coast started as a violent reaction by local fishermen against industrial fishing boats who were pilfering illegally but with perfect impunity the country’s fish reserves.
Covering three different periods in the long civil war from which Somalia seems unable to extricate itself since 1991, the three parts of the trilogy follow the same schema: the main character comes home after a long exile, is confronted with the violence emanating from the current episode of the conflict, but nevertheless finds back new roots. Cambara found love and decides to stay and live in Mogadishu. Jeebleh, the exile from the first novel, returns in the third one. It’s difficult not see there Nuruddin Farah’s shadow. He is himself an exiled novelist, who said that his work was an attempt “to keep my country alive by writing about it”.

Somalia: Nurrudin Farah – Travel Readings

[CTEP]

My book for November and December was the novel Knots by the Somali author Nuruddin Farah. While the book had some interesting moments, it was not one of my favorites. It was tough to get into because of its long sentences and big vocabulary. Some online reviewers said it was closer to a PhD dissertation than to a novel. I'd have to agree with that. I almost switched to another book, but after getting through the first 50 pages, I at least understood enough to keep going.

The story is about a woman named Cambara who was born in Somalia, but moves with her family to Toronto at a young age. During her adult life, she is told to go to Nairobi to fake marry her cousin and bring him back to Canada. Eventually the cousin announces he is divorcing her to marry another woman. The cousin treats his new wife and child poorly and physically abuses them. He then returns to Somalia to repair his life.

In the meantime, Cambara falls in love with a man she meets in Europe and brings him home to Canada as well. Soon after marriage, they give birth to a boy whom Cambara truly adores. Then one day Cambara goes on a trip leaving her husband in charge of their child's care. While she was gone, the boy drowns in their pool as his father was sleeping with his mistress indoors.

The death of her child due to her husband's adultery causes Cambara to seek anew. She goes against the advice of her mother and her friends and she decides to return to Somalia to reclaim her family's property from warlords. Upon arriving in Somalia, she is totally reliant on her cousin who she had formerly married. She finds him vile in many ways, but has no other choice but to live with him. Over time she forms a network and plots on how to retrieve her family property. It was really her plots and adventures through the city that were the most interesting parts of the book. However, I do question how realistic some parts may be. For example, she comes across two armed youth and takes them both down on her own by kicking and hitting them.

I'm not sure how accurate this book is on war torn Mogadishu, but I think it still gives insight on the situation that many of my students may have been living in. It would definitely be awful to live in a city ruled by sparring warlords where you can't go anywhere safely without an armed escort!

[Nick · Rating 2 out of 5]

In a word, mediocre.
When we see our own quirks in another creative work, it usually evokes a stronger reaction. Something we like about our work? Great to see it in others. Something we loathe? It evokes a seething rage. Thoughts which I’ve compiled are below.

Farah’s plot takes about forty pages to kick into first gear.
Early chapters have few page breaks. This is me, a grumpy old man, complaining about page and chapter breaks.
As Cambara meets and gets to know people, it becomes clear they will all unite for a single purpose---but Farah reveals that purpose much too late, and interest has since vanished.

And then, to make up for lost time, we are rushed through a denouement after almost 400 pages.

Characters are utilitarian. They each seem to serve some ultimate function(s), which is perfectly acceptable. What’s not is the brazen nonchalance Farah has through his protagonist, Cambara, in writing them off as useful. Each character in this work seems to exist to serve a purpose only to the protagonist.

Initially, Farah has us spend most of the book inside Cambara’s mind. The disassociation from the painful present (Cambara has suffered two abusive husbands and the death of her son) to try and reckon with the past would have been better merged with more action/sequences of events in the present.

The focality is mostly Cambara’s, but occasional shifts to other characters---which would be great, except in this liminal third-person limited perspective that means an observation or two which read no differently than those of Cambara.

[Muna Mangue · Rating 2 out of 5]

This Somali writer, tells the story of Cambara, the only protagonist of this novel. She represents her as a strong and independent woman born in Somalia but her childhood and youth years were spent in the United States. After the misfortune that happened in his life, he decides to run away from America and return to Somalia to recover a property that belonged to his family and has been taken away in times of war.

This novel of thirty-two chapters is very well structured, it is easy to follow and it is read fast enough but I do not find any plot. It's a fairly linear novel. I think that my disappointment with her has been to hope that at some point I would be surprised with "something", but it was not like that.

What has surprised me is the way in which Nuruddin has put himself in the shoes of a woman at all times, from her life in the United States to Somalia, he narrates her feelings and behavior in a way that does not seem written by a man. It is impressive as it describes the frustration of the Somali woman dominated by the Islamist and conservative man.

[César Torres Hernández · Rating 3 out of 5]

Nudos nos presenta a Cambara, una mujer somalí criada en el extranjero que regresa a Mogadiscio para recuperar la casa familiar y, en el proceso, reconstruirse emocionalmente. La novela aborda temas como el exilio, el trauma, el poder femenino y la reconstrucción en un contexto de guerra.

Aunque la premisa es interesante y la ambientación está cargada de realismo, la ejecución no me gustó del todo. Por un lado, la trama avanza con una rapidez que desafía la lógica: en apenas unas semanas, Cambara logra influir en múltiples personajes, enfrentarse a estructuras de poder y ejecutar planes complejos. Esta velocidad le resta verosimilitud a su transformación y a los cambios que provoca. Y por otro lado, me incomodó el uso del cliché del “salvador occidental”, aunque en este caso se trate de una mujer somalí de la diáspora.

Aun así, Nudos ofrece momentos valiosos de introspección y crítica social. Es una lectura que invita al debate, especialmente sobre el papel de la diáspora, el género y la representación en la literatura africana contemporánea.

[Oscar Espejo Badiola · Rating 4 out of 5]

Novela de mujeres para todos, novela de esperanza, de deseo y de posibles, de ser posible salir adelante, de ser posible acabar con la guerra y de ser posible vivir.
Una mujer criada en occidente regresa a Somalia, las diferencias que encuentra y las dificultades son obvias, pero para adelante, que es mujer y nada ni nadie puede con eso. Con trabajo y saber estar recupera lo suyo y consigue hacer feliz al lector, hecho importante y maravilloso.
Guerra civil, hambre, diferencia de géneros, represión religiosa, drogas, muerte, desaparecidos, miedo, todo esto aparece en la novela y todo esto es vencido con voluntad e inteligencia, trayendo paz, cultura, respeto, reencuentro y tranquilidad.
La primera parte de la trilogía me impresionó, pero la vi lenta, era más dura, pero sin el ritmo que tiene esta segunda parte.
Gran novela de esperanza.

[Michael · Rating 3 out of 5]

The author is loved by reviewers and has been mentioned as a candidate for the Nobel prize, but i have a lot of questions about Knots. Farah has been in exile for many years and I wonder whether he has a good handle on the situation in Somalia. I expected to get more out of this book about contemporary Mogadishu, but I’m not sure this was the place to find it. The focus on a feminist organization also raised questions in my mind. Does something like this exist? Would a Somali immigrant return to Mogadishu and realistically expect to recover her family’s property from a warlord? Would she fall helplessly in love after a brief ride in an automobile? Knots definitely has it’s moments and Farah’s writing style is fluent and expressive. But I don’t expect to read other works by this author.

[Alex]

I couldn't finish this book. I found the writing was far too descriptive, which took away from the story. The over examination of every detail made the entire plot drag on. The basis of the story was a wonderful idea, however as the story developed I found that the main character was really not particpating in the events that made the story progress. Instead the protaginast Camabra was more focused on remembering the same few events in her past, asking for favours, over-analyzing her feelings and directing her energy on the handful of people she met in Somalia. I felt that the important actions to develop the plotline were outsourced by Camabara to others. Instead the events in Somalia were told through Camabara's reaction's rather than her first hand experiences.

[Pallavi Narayan · Rating 1 out of 5]

I started this book anticipating something good, as I had heard about the author. I hadn't read anything by a Somalian, so thought it would be a way to get to know a little about the country and be immersed in a story by a moderately known voice. It was absolute disaster. Only telling, not showing, and what terrible telling too! Neverending sentences explaining things in too much unneeded detail, little things that don't tie up to the bigger picture, unnatural, wooden characters, no atmosphere whatsoever. After struggling through half the book, I had to leave it and didn't bother wasting more time on it.

[Aronne · Rating 3 out of 5]

Quando sono a circa metà lettura ho iniziato a trarre queste conclusioni: storia interessante, una donna in lutto, torna nel suo paese natio, distrutto dalla guerra, per trovare/ portate pace.
Fino a qui nn fa una piega, la grave pecca,nn so se per colpa della traduzione, la narrazione risulta posticcia, la protagonista dipinta come un'eroina senza macchia, un'amazzone, intellettuale senza colpa, in cerca di un figlio adottivo che possa colmare il vuoto.
Vediamo come va a finire,il New York Times l'ha inserita nella lista dei migliori libri del 2007.

[Baljit · Rating 2 out of 5]

I struggled with this book. Just found the protagonist rather unrealistic in her understanding of the adversities in war torn Mogadishu, and she had the propensity for trying to fix all the problematic men in her life. She then tries to help the young men who are ‘security agents’ armed with AK47s, with outlandish dreams of resettling them. Seemed over ambitious.

I found the story rather meandering- the build up was v slow, and then the writing was clunky.

[Melinda Rachlin · Rating 3 out of 5]

I enjoyed this novel but it was very slow moving. I was surprised to learn the author was male because I thought the story was written from a woman's point of view. I can give credit for that. For me the story had a bit of a fairy tale vibe to it, a living your best life in a tragic circumstance.

It was worth the read but this is not a beach read by a long shot.

[Tommie · Rating 1 out of 5]

We read this for book club, and by the time the evening for discussion came around, we were all so annoyed it with that we joyously shared our favorite least believable moments and every now and then someone would try to play devil's advocate but not even be able to keep it up.
According to this book, Somalia is a lovely place, where you can easily achieve all your goals, get your hotel bill (and that of whatever random teenage boy you make eye contact with and decide to become his savior) for free, start a local community theater, have topless hotel parties, fall so madly in love without exchanging more than two sentences that you're still willing to clean up the shit of a man that again, you've only spoken two sentences to.
As a tourism brochure for Mogadishu, maybe this piece works. If it had been pitched as magical realism, maybe it could've worked. Purporting to have any semblance of realistic characters, or literary achievements, it does not.

[Dale · Rating 1 out of 5]

well I didn’t get far in this novel of despair. It sure looked interesting…I’m swearing off foreign authors for the rest of my life…New hardback, 2007, 419 pgs.

[Grace Lillian · Rating 3 out of 5]

I wanted to read this to learn more about Somalia. It was a bit of a slog...very slow-moving. But I liked Cambara’s backstory, the ending, and the Gacal subplot.

[Tumelo Moleleki · Rating 2 out of 5]

😌

[Lauren · Rating 3 out of 5]

Cambara terminó como en realidad es, ganando pero con un tizbo de locura.

[Sophie · Rating 4 out of 5]

Une plongée dans un pays en guerre à travers le regard d'une femme prête à tout pour se remettre du décès de son fils.

[Anne-Trine · Rating 1 out of 5]

A book full of unnecessary details, close to badly written. Waste of time.