Haunting Questions; What does it take to turn a decent man into a killer?(Links)(Book Review)

Byline: Malcolm Jones

It's easy to see why Nuruddin Farah's name keeps coming up as a likely recipient of a Nobel Prize in Literature. He has the good fortune--from a writer's point of view--of being a native of Somalia, a Third World country whose recent past has been cursed first by dictatorship, then by civil war. Farah himself was persecuted and exiled during the years of dictatorship. But his eligibility for the Nobel is much more than circumstantial. He has turned not just his hard life but the life of his native country into the heart of his fiction. His books debate the great themes--people versus the state, clan versus nationality, family versus the individual--just the sort of writing that stirs the hearts of those high-minded judges in Stockholm. Just the kind of book that usually puts you to sleep by the second chapter. And that's the noteworthy thing about Farah. His strange and compelling books don't just keep you awake. They haunt you.

"Links" (336 pages. Riverhead Books ), Farah's ninth novel, begins and ends with a murder. No sooner has Jeeblah, the protagonist, disembarked from an airplane at the Mogadishu airport than he sees a man shot dead for no good reason. Quite sensibly, Jeeblah is horrified. He has come from America, where he is a college professor, to find his mother's grave and make peace with her memory. But old friends and enemies keep getting in his way. In no time, he's mixed up in the efforts of two friends to get their kidnapped children back. By the time the last murder in the book occurs, Jeeblah himself is deeply implicated.

How he ...