Links

Table of Contents

 

 

 

 

 

Praise for
Links

“It is a looking-glass world that the Somalian novelist Nuruddin Farah takes us through in his novel.... [T]he story of a longtime Somalian exile exploring his country's disintegration is . . . a work of realism.... Only the setting is miasmic, pocked with shell holes and quicksands and drift-high in seeming monsters and freaks who are humans entirely, as Farah is artist enough to make us see, caught in monstrosity and freakishness.”

—
The New York Times Book Review

 

“It's easy to see why Nuruddin Farah's name keeps coming up as a likely recipient of a Nobel Prize in Literature.... [Farah's] strange and compelling books don't just keep you awake. They haunt you. . . . Like Joseph Conrad and Graham Greene, writers to whom he can be favorably compared, Farah poses questions that, once asked, never go away.”

—
Newsweek

 

“A terrifying window into a lawless country ... a political thriller for a nation with no politics but anarchy.”

—
San Francisco Chronicle

 

“A nuanced tale of lives wrenched apart both by civil war and by foreign meddling.”

—
Entertainment Weekly

 

“Farah . . . has said he hopes to reclaim Somalia through his writing. With
Links
, he accomplishes that mission with blinding intensity.”

—
TimeOut New York

 

“Intelligent and complex.... [Farah is]
the
literary voice of his country on the world stage.”

—
Star Tribune
(Minneapolis)

 

“Unsparing in its portrait of a land overwhelmed by poverty, war and corruption.”

—
The Baltimore Sun

 

“This is the slightly abstract, slightly surreal territory where several Nobel laureates hang out, writers like Singer, Márquez, and Saramago, and it's no coincidence that Farah has been held up in their company. . . . [
Links
is] a haunting exploration of the desire to help and the attendant costs of doing so.”

—
The Christian Science Monitor

 

“A masterful tale ... A harrowing story of moral and physical disintegration in a once-gracious city.... A searing portrait of one of Africa's worst killing fields, by one of her most distinguished writers.”

—
Kirkus Reviews
(starred)

 

“Stunning, timely ... Farah skillfully delineates the emotional transformations that take place in Jeebleh as he becomes accustomed to his changed homeland . . . the publication of this beautifully written book should be one of the year's literary events.”

—
Publishers Weekly
(starred)

 

“
Links
creatively provides an insightful social commentary and analysis of Somalia's civil war.”

—
Sunday Times
(Johannesburg)

 

“Farah . . . has given us a masterpiece of resourcefulness, of hope that cannot be kidnapped or destroyed just because the individual is worth less than the clan. What makes Jeebleh's journey through the living remnants of Mogadiscio especially immediate is Farah's condensation of narrative, his coifed prose with not a word out of place. The reader is led as if through a maze where there is never a dead end, yet never an exit and the limits are not so much the solid walls of Mogadiscio's crumbling infrastructure, but the emotional and familial links which determine in which direction the guns, and limits, are pointed.”

—
African Review of Books

 

“Supremely powerful meditation on violence, evil, and the possibilities of human redemption ... This is a significant novel by an important novelist.”

—
Booklist

PENGUIN BOOKS

LINKS

Nuruddin Farah is the author of eight novels, most recently the Blood in the Sun trilogy:
Maps, Gifts,
and
Secrets
. His novels have been translated into seventeen languages and have won numerous awards. Farah was named the 1998 laureate of the Neustadt International Prize for Literature, “widely regarded as the most prestigious international literary award after the Nobel” (
The New York Times
). Born in Baidoa, Somalia, he now lives in Cape Town, South Africa.

PENGUIN BOOKS

Published by the Penguin Group
Penguin Group (USA) Inc., 375 Hudson Street, New York, New York 10014, U.S.A.
Penguin Group (Canada), 90 Eglinton Avenue East, Suite 700, Toronto,
Ontario, Canada M4P 2Y3 (a division of Pearson Penguin Canada Inc.)
Penguin Books Ltd, 80 Strand, London WC2R 0RL, England
Penguin Ireland, 25 St Stephen's Green, Dublin 2, Ireland (a division of Penguin Books Ltd)
Penguin Group (Australia), 250 Camberwell Road, Camberwell,
Victoria 3124, Australia (a division of Pearson Australia Group Pty Ltd)
Penguin Books India Pvt Ltd, 11 Community Centre, Panchsheel Park, New Delhi–110 017, India
Penguin Group (NZ), 67 Apollo Drive, Mairangi Bay
Auckland 1311, New Zealand (a division of Pearson New Zealand Ltd)
Penguin Books (South Africa) (Pty) Ltd, 24 Sturdree Avenue,
Rosebank, Johannesburg 2196, South Africa

 

Penguin Books Ltd, Registered Offices: 80 Strand, London WC2R 0RL, England

 

 

First published in the United States of American by Riverhead Books,
a member of Penguin Group (USA) Inc. 2003
Published in Penguin Books 2005

 

Copyright © Nuruddin Farah, 2003 All rights reserved

 

Originally published by Kwela Books, South Africa, in a significantly different form.

 

Links / Nuruddin, Farah.

p. cm.

ISBN : 978-1-101-54847-9

1. Mogadishu (Somalia)—Fiction. 2. Americans—Somali—Fiction.

3. Political refugees—Fiction. 4. Somali-Americans—Fiction. 5. Mothers-—Death—Fiction.

6. Abduction—Fiction. I. Title.

PR9396.9.F3L

823'.914—dc22

 

 

The image on the title page is an aerial photograph of the Somalian Coast.

 

 

The scanning, uploading and distribution of this book via the Internet or via any other means without the permission of the publisher is illegal and punishable by law. Please purchase only authorized electronic editions, and do not participate in or encourage electronic piracy of copyrighted material, Your support of the author's rights is appreciated.

If you don't want to be a monster, you've got to be like your fellow creatures, in conformity with the species, the image of your relations. Or else have progeny that make you the first link in the chain of a new species. For monsters do not reproduce.

MICHEL TOURNIER

The individual leads in actual fact a double life, one in which he is an end to himself and another in which he is a link in a chain which he serves against his will or at least independently of his will.

SIGMUND FREUD

A dog starved at his master's gate
Predicts the ruin of the state!

WILLIAM BLAKE

“GUNS LACK THE BODY OF HUMAN TRUTHS!”

Barely had his feet touched the ground in Mogadiscio, soon after landing at a sandy airstrip to the north of the city in a twin-engine plane from Nairobi, when Jeebleh heard a man make this curious statement. He felt rather flatfooted in the way he moved away from the man, who followed him. Jeebleh watched the passengers pushing one another to retrieve their baggage lined up on the dusty floor under the wings of the aircraft. Such was the chaos that fierce arguments erupted between passengers and several of the men offering their services as porters, men whom Jeebleh would not trust. Who were these loiterers? He knew that Somalis were of the habit of throwing
despedida
parties to bid their departing dear ones farewell, and of joyously and noisily welcoming them in droves at airports and bus depots when they returned from a trip. However, the loiterers gathered here looked as though they were unemployed, and were out to get what they could, through fair or foul means. He wouldn't put it past those who were armed to stage a stickup, or to shoot in order to get what they were after. He was in great discomfort that the Antonov had landed not at the city's main airport—retaken by a warlord after the hasty departure of the U.S. Marines—but at a desolate airstrip, recently reclaimed from the surrounding no-man's-land between the sand dunes and low desert shrubs, and the sea.