Volume 46, Number 4 · March 4, 1999
On the Edge of Catastrophe
By Neal Ascherson
Secrets
by Nuruddin Farah
Arcade, 298 pp., $23.95
Nuruddin Farah, the most important African novelist to emerge in the last twenty-five years, is also one of the most sophisticated voices in modern fiction. He is not the first African writer to have escaped from Eurocentric canons about social change, but he is the most accomplished. Those canons were deeply conservative and gloom-ridden, in the sense that they assumed that all change which burst asunder a traditional and 'organic' society was a loss, a destruction. It might be a loss worth paying in order to achieve something else, the entry charge to a more open and tolerant mode of living or to the lonely but sovereign existence of an urban intellectual. But modernization—the source of this sort of transformation—must always produce pain, alienation, incomprehension between generations. The tears wept for that pain have filled the buckets of Tolstoy, Musil, Balzac, Henry James, George Eliot. Nuruddin Farah sheds his own tears, but rarely and not over the unkindness of change.
Review, 2153 words
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