Knots

Zusatztext "A literary vision both broad and deep! the vision of an exile and a patriot." - The New York Times Book Review "A brutal! beautiful! unforgettable unveiling of a volatile city and a complex woman 'risking her life in order to get the better of her loss.'" - People "This is an intriguing! poetically intense and deeply pleasurable read." - Los Angeles Times Informationen zum Autor Nuruddin Farah Klappentext From the internationally acclaimed author of North of Dawn comes "a beautiful, hopeful novel about one woman's return to war-ravaged Mogadishu" ( Time ) Called "one of the most sophisticated voices in modern fiction" ( The New York Review of Books ), Nuruddin Farah is widely recognized as a literary genius. He proves it yet again with Knots , the story of a woman who returns to her roots and discovers much more than herself. Born in Somalia but raised in North America, Cambara flees a failed marriage by traveling to Mogadishu. And there, amid the devastation and brutality, she finds that her most unlikely ambitions begin to seem possible. Conjuring the unforgettable extremes of a fractured Muslim culture and the wayward Somali state through the eyes of a strong, compelling heroine, Knots is another Farah masterwork. Chapter 8 Feeling like a different person with a brand-new selfhood, so to speak, Cambara comes out of Zaak's house the following morning, dressed in a head-to-foot veil in the all-occluding shape of a body tent. To top it off, she has worn a strip of muslin cloth, which she holds between her teeth, like a horse with a bit, to keep it firmly in place, covering her entire face. She is donning the all-hiding garment for the first and only time in her life in the hope of disguising her identity. She walks with the consciously cautious tread of an astronaut taking his very first steps in outer space. Her forward motion plodding, her every gait a pained shuffle, her pace is as slow moving as that of a camel with its feet tied together. From a distance, she looks like a miniature Somali nomad's aqal on wheels. Cambara is on her way to her family's expropriated property, discreetly consulting a map she has drawn from memory; Zaak, along with the driver, took her to within a block of the house late yesterday afternoon. She is finding it cumbersome to do so or to look around, hampered by the all-obstructing veil. Her feet feel trapped, her chest choked and her motion hindered. She is hot; she is boiling under the collar like a traveler hauling heavy bags she does not know what to do with. She is angry with herself for not returning to Zaak and then changing into an easy-to-wear garment and supplementing this with a niqab , a mere face veil. She slogs with the slowness of a van with terrible shock absorbers, leaning this way and then that in complete disharmony; she is in a great deal of discomfort, perspiring heavily inside her bothersome veil and hitching up her cotton drawers as though expecting that she might sense some air passing through. Notwithstanding all this, she lumbers on, convinced that she will tower above potential aggressors in the likeness of armed youths if they attack her from close range, thanks to her hidden weapon of choice, a knife tucked away in her pocket. Cambara has always seen herself as a potential member of a cloak-and-dagger sorority, and she thinks that a knife is handy when one is surprising an armed foe who is expecting one to be unarmed. She walks tall and well built; she is very imposing, very impressive; she fearlessly hobbles along. She draws her eyebrows close together in concentration, her mind busily sorting out the thoughts coming at her in waves. She is thinking about the number of codes that she has broken both before coming here and since then. Even though she is officially married to Wardi, she...

Product details

• Authors: Nuruddin Farah
• Publisher: Riverhead
• Languages: English
• Product format: Paperback
• Released: 25.03.2008
• EAN: 9780143112983
• ISBN: 978-0-14-311298-3
• No. of pages: 419
• Dimensions: 135 mm x 203 mm x 21 mm
• Series: Past Imperfect Series; Past Imperfect; Past Imperfect Series; Past Imperfect Trilogy
• Subject: Fiction > Narrative literature