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Knots Nuruddin Farah Books

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Knots Nuruddin Farah Books

Utter rubbish. This was the freshman "required" book my freshman year at Georgetown University, which was rank #21 or so on the list of best colleges in the nation. I have no idea why one of the best universities in the country asked an entire YEAR of students to read this piece of junk. They had "required" workshops on the class that almost no one went to because almost no one read the book because everyone thought it was trash. Literally, most of us including myself threw it in the trash afterward. I wanted to burn it.


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Knots Nuruddin Farah Books Reviews

I had to force myself to finish this book; somehow I felt that if I made it through the entire thing, something about the plot, the characters, or the subject matter would help it redeem itself. I was sorely wrong. The plot is incredibly contrived, the author (a man) presumably has a very skewed idea of what a woman's thought process might be, and what could have been a very interesting social commentary about civil war-torn Somalia fell short into platitudes and generalities. But the worst thing, by far, about Knots was the writing style. I felt like it had actually been translated into English from another language -- which is not a bad thing in itself -- but had then been scoured by someone looking to replace every other word with something from a thesaurus. The author mixed colloquial language and cliches with what he probably thought was very serious, "literary" passages -- extremely off-putting and jarring to read. The point of view of the book was also extremely distracting... second person omniscient? I felt like the whole story could have been more believable (and more of the horribly contorted and strained language contextualized) if the story had been told in the first person.

In short, this is an awkward and painful book to read; the prose made me cringe at least once every 5 pages. Yikes!
Cambara is a grieving mother who is estranged from her husband and smothered by her loving but overbearing mother. She leaves Toronto for the city she grew up in, Mogadiscio, where she hopes to recover the family house from the warlord occupying it. Cambara is a likable character, a strong and determined woman. Her viewpoint is so sympathetic and her disgust at some of the ways of men, including the details of their slovenly personal habits, would lead one to believe that this novel was written by a woman if one didn't know better.

Farah's style of writing starts off effective but grows more ponderous as the book continues. He includes various literary references, sometimes interesting, and descriptions that contain rather visual similes that sometimes get a bit out there. He will sometimes describe the same detail or thought that a character has several times, almost as if he had written down every way he thought of wording something and then didn't go back to edit anything out. Every time Cambara takes an action, we are presented with her conflicting thoughts on what she is doing in a way that includes all the difficulties that every action can entail in the environment that she is in, such as a decision of whether or not to wear a veil. However, every thought and action is described in such detail that it slows the action of the book to a crawl in some places and dilutes the impact.
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 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!"

After her good deed with the warlord's girlfriend, saintly Cambara pulls two random urchins off the street and basically adopts them. That I can buy, given the recent loss of her son, but I can't buy how they miraculously both turn out to be good, sweet, well-behaved boys who only needed a bath and a change of clothes to become like normal children again. 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? I'm not going to bother to try to find out.
I struggled through this book. The writing style was ponderous at best. In the end, I didn't care about the main character. I actually disliked her and I don't think that was the intention. Plus the ending was rather anti-climactic. All in all a disappointment.
Not up to Farah's usual writing quality
Utter rubbish. This was the freshman "required" book my freshman year at Georgetown University, which was rank #21 or so on the list of best colleges in the nation. I have no idea why one of the best universities in the country asked an entire YEAR of students to read this piece of junk. They had "required" workshops on the class that almost no one went to because almost no one read the book because everyone thought it was trash. Literally, most of us including myself threw it in the trash afterward. I wanted to burn it.