Gifts: A Novel (2) (The Blood in the Sun Trilogy) - Softcover

Farah, Nuruddin

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1628725826 ISBN 13: 9781628725827

Publisher: Arcade, 2016

Synopsis

Nuruddin Farah is one of the finest contemporary African novelists.” Salman Rushdie

The second novel in Nuruddin Farah's Blood in the Sun trilogy, Gifts is the beguiling tale of a Somali family and the struggles of its powerful matriarch to keep it whole. Duniya is a single mother, raising twins while working as a nurse in a Mogadiscio hospital. Her self-sufficient world is rocked when her rebellious daughter brings home a mysterious foundling infant. And when Duniya accepts a ride to work from a wealthy, romantically interested family friend, her whole life is turned upside down.

Meanwhile, the hospital where she works is besieged by a desperate population ravaged by war, drought, disease, and famine. Western relief agencies have invaded Somalia with their charity, and some Somalis chafe at tainted goods and the burden of debts they can never hope to repay. With lyrical, luxuriant prose, Farah weaves a spellbinding tapestry of reportage, dreams, memory, folktales, and family lore. In his hands, Duniya's tale becomes emblematic of the struggles of an entire people.

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About this title

Review:

Though he has lived in exile for the last 20 years, Nuruddin Farah's eye never strays far from his native Somalia. In Maps and Secrets, the first and third volumes in his Blood in the Sun trilogy, he explored the devastating effects of tribal hatred and civil war on his society; the middle volume, Gifts, however, is of a different stripe altogether. Though also set in Somalia, it is a sunnier, more optimistic novel, and a love story, to boot. The protagonist is Duniya, a nurse at a maternity hospital in Mogadishu. Once widowed and once divorced, she has experienced the injustices heaped upon women in her culture--as a young girl Duniya was given by her father to an elderly man to be his wife; after his death she remarried, only to have her child taken from her by her alcoholic husband's family when they divorced. Free at last, she has no intentions of getting entangled again--until she meets Bosaaso, an American-educated economist who has returned to Somalia to help his country during its economic crisis:

Duniya thought that marriage was a place she had been to twice already, but love was a palace she hadn't had the opportunity to set foot in before now. If what she and Bosaaso were doing was the beginning of a long courtship that might eventually lead to such a many-roomed mansion of love, so be it. So far she had only seen glimpses of it, in a rear-view mirror, in the eyes of a driver who wasn't a taxi driver.

But love is not all Nuruddin has on his mind. He constantly reexamines the theme of gifts, from the personal gifting of one's body or heart to the impersonal "aid" bestowed by wealthy nations upon the poorer ones. But Gifts is hardly a political tract, for it consistently eschews the general in favor of the particular. In tracing Duniya's budding relationship with Bosaaso, Nuruddin not only tells the love story of two individuals but also etches a remarkable portrait of women in Somalia. The relationship between Duniya and Bosaaso is sweet, funny, and tender, but it is in her ties to her women friends and daughters that the book shines. As she learns to swim and drive, to stand up to her overbearing former in-laws and to trust her heart, it is within the context of an extended web of friends and family. Maps and Secrets expose the uglier aspects of war-torn Somalia; Gifts, on the other hand, offers its hidden strengths. --Alix Wilber

About the Author:

Nuruddin Farah was born in 1945 in Baidoa, Somalia. He is the author of numerous novels, novellas, short stories, and plays. His novels include Hiding in Plain Sight, Crossbones, and his trilogies Variations on the Theme of an African Dictatorship and Blood in the Sun, which comprises Maps and Gifts as well as Secrets. After the publication of Sweet and Sour Milk in 1979, Farah became persona non grata in Somalia and served a self-imposed exile of more than twenty years, before he was permitted to visit in 1996. His novels have been translated into many languages and have won numerous international awards. Farah was named the 1998 laureate of the Neustadt International Prize for Literature. He now divides his time between Cape Town, South Africa and Annandale, New York.

About this edition

• Publisher: Arcade
• Publication date: 2016
• ISBN 10: 1628725826
• ISBN 13: 9781628725827
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 256