Africa Today

Since 1994, when this bookfirst appeared, its subject has belatedly attained a much higher profile. A perennial also-ran for the Nobel Prize in Literature, the Somali writer Nuruddin Farah has in recent years been the subject of scores of scholarly articles, a handful of dissertations, two and a half monographs, and one critical anthology, the latter edited by Wright himself. But for scholarly depth, distinction, and consistency, none of these surpasses Wright's own pioneering study. Though he has published widely on other African writers, he is the doyen of Farah critics, and so a new edition of his venerable text, augmented to account for most of Farah's more recent [End Page 141] output (the latest novel, Links, appeared while Wright's book was in press), is most welcome.

A scholar's scholar, Wright is unapologetically old-fashioned: his study is intended as an introductory overview of Farah's fiction, and for the most part he has sidestepped "more arcane and recondite critical territory" (p. 3) for dense but lucid close readings focusing on theme, symbol, and narrative technique. Wright has always taken care to situate Farah's work within its appropriate cultural and political contexts, however, which contexts he deftly and sensitively adumbrates in an introductory chapter. He is at pains to emphasize that in Farah's often elusive texts—grounded equally in Somali oratory, Arabic classicism, and European modernism, and influenced by such diverse contemporaries as Borges, Grass, and Rushdie—"the ancient and the postmodern join hands" (p. 15). Indeed, Wright nimbly surveys Farah's full stylistic range, from the "unadorned" prose of his début, From a Crooked Rib, to the highly wrought figures, convoluted narratives, and cryptic themes of his more mature works. Often, he observes, Farah playfully mixes his stylistic palette: Sweet and Sour Milk, for example, is a "conflation of detective novel, political thriller[,] and nouveau roman" (p. 15), passed through the filter of a "surrealist poetics" (p. 45).

The book is broken into discrete essays on each of Farah's works, but every chapter is informed by a panoptic view of his career, whose trajectory Wright has charted for two decades. More champion than critic, he is circumspect about the occasional vagaries of Farah's prose, and he is sober but forgiving in his consideration of such lesser achievements as Gifts. Nevertheless, Wright's interpretations are thorough, subtle, and astute, never reductive or dogmatic, and if he is generous, he is also evenhanded. His voice is lively, intelligent, and readable, and his fair-minded sensibility above all helps readers appreciate the complexity and originality of Farah's work. Since the text of the previous edition survives here with minor alterations, its admiring reviews should also stand: Jacqueline Bardolph, for example, who deemed it "a landmark in the criticism of the African novel," pays Wright the highest compliment when she declares that "his own text has the same blend of commitment and skeptical distance as the novelist's."

As for the material new to this edition: the chapter on Secrets, one of Farah's best and most ambitious novels, aims to be exhaustive, but winds up feeling a bit rangy instead. Still, in reprising there the notion of "family as the germ of national predicament" (p. 147), a theme first sounded in the masterful analysis of Sweet and Sour Milk, Wright discredits the glib notion, too common in the West, that clan affiliation is "an authentic marker of Somali identity or . . . the root cause of civil anarchy" (p. 157). As Wright has long argued, Farah's work may depict a country bedeviled by clan politics, but it also demonstrates that clan per se is a "pretext . . . rather than explanation" (p. 157.). It was the odious Siyad Barre, Somalia's political father, who poisoned the gene-pool by "undermin[ing]" clan loyalties "only to pervert [them] to his own ends" (p. 9). The central theme of Secrets, [End Page 142] then, Wright insists, is the "disjunctive...