[In the following review, Malcomson discusses how Secrets shows Farah's changing style and Somalia's changing political situation.]

The Somali novelist Nuruddin Farah specializes in strange and difficult births. Sholoongo, for example, in Farah's new novel, Secrets, is said to have been a duugan, a baby born to be buried. （Farah writes in English, but he seizes words from Somali, Italian, or Arabic when he needs them.） Abandoned by her mother, Sholoongo purportedly finds comfort in the maternal paws of a lioness. As a child, she is returned to her people; her mother responds with suicide. Farah presents the story as if it were lively material from a deeply disturbing talk show. “You might think this far-fetched,” one character says of Sholoongo's saga, “but this is the stuff of which some people's misfortune is made, myth galore!”

Secrets is an inquiry into the origins of a young man named Kalaman, who has long entertained doubts about his ancestry. When Sholoongo returns to Somalia, after a long absence, intending to become pregnant by Kalaman, her demand plunges him into self-examination. His penis is small, his father's and grandfather's are famously large. Sholoongo pointed this out to him long ago, but only in manhood has the incongruity hit him with full force. He wants to know the family secrets. He interrogates his parents, his grandfather, and Sholoongo about the truth of who he is. Understandably, this makes everyone uncomfortable, and increasingly so, for the more Kalaman knows, the more his family's myths collide and collapse. Is his father truly his father? And why does his mother have four breasts? Kalaman's line of questioning uncovers the brutal circumstances of both his own origins and his country's.

Farah sets Secrets in the moments before Somalia's breakup into warring clans. The dictator Mohamed Siad Barre is about to leave the capital, Mogadishu, after twenty-one grotesque years in power. Soon it will become a matter of critical importance whether you are from the Dulbahante or the Warsangeli subclan or are an Ogaadeen or a Marehan, or something else. If you don't know, you had better find out, or you might die without understanding why. In Secrets Farah reminds his readers that they will die anyway, that origins are a messy business, and that the truth of who one is may not be found in legends of birth.

Nuruddin Farah was awarded this year's Neustadt Prize; previous winners have been Octavio Paz, Gabriel García Márquez, and Czeslaw Milosz, each of whom went on to win the Nobel. Farah has become something of a spokesman for his African generation, but as a political novelist he is noticeably oblique. He overwhelms the ideological and historical premises of his books with a fabulist's imaginings—ambitious insects, hustling characters, opaque folktales, bits of song. Birds distract his characters in mid-argument, alighting on the page with charming disregard and pecking here and there, only to fly away; other animals, too, tend to visit unannounced—notably, crocodiles, though also, in Secrets, a determinedly vengeful elephant.

This sort of narrative trampling has increased in the course of Farah's career. He wrote the trilogy that made his reputation, Variations on the Theme of an African Dictatorship, in the late nineteen-seventies and early eighties, when he was in his thirties. Volume I, Sweet and Sour Milk, sealed an exile begun several years before—Siad Barre cannot have enjoyed epithets like “the Grand Jailer of Somalia's Grand Prison”—and the three novels retain a certain clarity of political vision. But nature's importuning herd was already there, eager to block traffic, as when, in Sweet and Sour Milk, two men having an urgent political conversation in a speeding car have to stop for “a camel right in the middle of the road licking the grass-remains.”

As Farah's country has lurched through every conceivable form of governance short of stable democracy, and as he himself has aged, his stories have become more desperately fertile. He has also made them more comic. In Secrets, poor, inquisitive Kalaman witnesses a bounty of copulations, all more spectacular than his own. They drive him to distraction. Crows, locusts, whiffs of sandalwood, tastes of tamarind juice and blood—all these interrupt his earnest efforts to determine his parentage. Especially blood, which is made to carry so many metaphorical meanings that it loses all sense as it spills across the pages. Kalaman's grandfather assaults him with talk of blood, his voice “like water seeping in,” Farah writes. “It found space in Kalaman's empty skull, in which it formed puddles. Now as Kalaman touched his forehead, he thought: My God, I'm leaking.” His grandfather floats dark thoughts in Kalaman's head, thoughts “as immense as the corpse of a hippo.” The image is both nutty and apt—not so much comic as hysterical.

When Kalaman finally tracks down his origins, he finds a multiplicity of potential parents, impossible to trace. Farah links this to Somalia's fate. Kalaman stammers, “Yes, an epoch has resolved itself to a finale!” Farah has said that his ambition is “to keep my country alive by writing about it,” and that may explain why his novels have so often concerned births. But in Secrets the investigation of a birth ends in violence, dissolution, and death. “Our country,” Kalaman's once indomitable grandfather tells him, “is as good as gone.” Even the novelist, try as he may, cannot keep it alive.