elienore's review against another edition
emotional
informative
reflective
medium-paced
- Plot- or character-driven? A mix
- Strong character development? Yes
- Loveable characters? Yes
- Diverse cast of characters? Yes
- Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes
5.0
Content Warnings
Moderate: Xenophobia, Violence, and Physical abuse
Minor: Hate crime, Alcohol, Suicide, and Rape
annamontana's review against another edition
challenging
dark
emotional
reflective
tense
slow-paced
- Plot- or character-driven? Character
- Strong character development? Yes
- Loveable characters? It's complicated
- Diverse cast of characters? Yes
- Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes
4.0
Mugdi and Gacalo are Somalis living in Oslo. They have lived there for years. Now their son's widow and children are moving to Oslo. How will they assimilate? Will they take on their stepfather's extremist views?
This is a slow but moving story of cultures, extremists (both Jihadi and skin head), and family. The characters are well written. Tensions rise and fall through out the book but never leave totally. I want to read more by the author, who is a well known Somali author.
This is a slow but moving story of cultures, extremists (both Jihadi and skin head), and family. The characters are well written. Tensions rise and fall through out the book but never leave totally. I want to read more by the author, who is a well known Somali author.
foxgallagher's review against another edition
emotional
hopeful
slow-paced
- Plot- or character-driven? A mix
- Strong character development? Yes
- Loveable characters? Yes
- Diverse cast of characters? Yes
- Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes
3.0
black_girl_reading's review against another edition
4.0
This lovely book was my first written by a Somalian and also my first situated in Norway, and so I spent a fair bit of the book trying to place the abruptness of the language, which was also unfamiliar to me. About a Norwegian-Somali family that is forever changed by the addition of the wife of their late jihadist son, and his two step children to their numbers, I came to appreciate the directness of the writing, particularly as the topic itself was so complex and multilayered. The book explored grief and violence and fundamentalism and the resiliency and adaptability of the human spirit, and the immense lovability of precious, precocious, changing children. This book was dedicated to Farah’s own younger sister who was killed in a suicide bombing in Kabul, and I felt the enormity of his loss, and appreciated so much that he was still able to explore the nuances that shape the path of folks towards extremism, or away from it, without making any broad generalizations about individual character or creating easy answers about why this happens. This book was unresolved in so many ways, and that was okay. In the end, I read a family shrinking and growing and ebbing and flowing and adjusting and progressing and regressing and being. I read intertwined lives. I read a lovely consideration of an important topic in a measured and thoughtful prose.
marite's review against another edition
2.0
Hvis dette er Somalias beste romanforfatter, har Somalia problemer på litteraturfronten - også.
Farah har lagt handlingen til Oslo, et sted han åpenbart aldri har vært. Forfatteren sløser ikke med stedskoloritt, og godt er det, for mye av det som blir nevnt, er det vanskelig å kjenne seg igjen i.
Elever er ikke på etternavn med lærerne sine, man får ikke 7 års fengsel for urettmessig å ha anklaget noen for voldtekt, nesten alle bruker elektrisitet for å lage mat, ikke gass osv. osv. Det verste er dialogen. Nå vet ikke jeg mye om hvordan somaliere snakker sammen, men jeg har vondt for å tro at det er på denne stive, forelesende måten. Selve historien er ganske interessant, men romanens "skurk" IS-enken, blir aldri noe annet enn en pappfigur.
Farah har lagt handlingen til Oslo, et sted han åpenbart aldri har vært. Forfatteren sløser ikke med stedskoloritt, og godt er det, for mye av det som blir nevnt, er det vanskelig å kjenne seg igjen i.
Elever er ikke på etternavn med lærerne sine, man får ikke 7 års fengsel for urettmessig å ha anklaget noen for voldtekt, nesten alle bruker elektrisitet for å lage mat, ikke gass osv. osv. Det verste er dialogen. Nå vet ikke jeg mye om hvordan somaliere snakker sammen, men jeg har vondt for å tro at det er på denne stive, forelesende måten. Selve historien er ganske interessant, men romanens "skurk" IS-enken, blir aldri noe annet enn en pappfigur.
zainub_reads's review against another edition
4.0
Gacalo and Mugdi are Somalis living in Oslo as loyal citizens of Norway however, despite their good intentions they are unable to stop their son, Dhaqaneh from getting swept up in radical propaganda that leads to him ending his life as a suicide bomber in Somalia.
Before his suicide Dhaqaneh asks Gacalo for a promise -that she would take care of his wife and step-children if something were to happen to him and in order to keep her word, Gacalo arranges for his son’s widow, Waliya and the two children to come and settle in Oslo.
This is the story of the events that follow their arrival and the repercussions Gacalo and Mugdi face as a result of the promise.
The complex intersection of myriad themes like immigration, fundamentalism, radicalization, acclimatization, acceptance and intolerance among many others was a very gripping subject to read of.
The dilemma Mugdi faces in choosing his identity as a person being connected to many places but not really being rooted to anyone place in particular was heartbreaking and his witnessing his host country’s growing intolerance while his birth-country is on an unexplainable downward spiral -felt like a portrait of our times.
Though it has a very strong premise the execution of the narrative left a bit more to be desired.
For instance, there wasn’t any insight into the inner workings of any character nor were their motives fully explored.
Also, the very formal voice felt out of place at times and despite the audiobook’s narrator having done a wonderful job I felt like the writing did not reflect the time period well enough and the dialogue was in-cohesive and abrupt probably, due to the translation being unable to fully capture the essence of the language it was written in.
Waliya is mostly referred to as “the widow” instead of by name not sure if it’s a culture thing but that really felt odd.
There are a lot of little tangents throughout the story that were interesting and added to making the story a memorable one.
⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️
“There are moments in one's life when everything one considers to be a win is for all practical purposes a loss.”
Before his suicide Dhaqaneh asks Gacalo for a promise -that she would take care of his wife and step-children if something were to happen to him and in order to keep her word, Gacalo arranges for his son’s widow, Waliya and the two children to come and settle in Oslo.
This is the story of the events that follow their arrival and the repercussions Gacalo and Mugdi face as a result of the promise.
The complex intersection of myriad themes like immigration, fundamentalism, radicalization, acclimatization, acceptance and intolerance among many others was a very gripping subject to read of.
The dilemma Mugdi faces in choosing his identity as a person being connected to many places but not really being rooted to anyone place in particular was heartbreaking and his witnessing his host country’s growing intolerance while his birth-country is on an unexplainable downward spiral -felt like a portrait of our times.
Though it has a very strong premise the execution of the narrative left a bit more to be desired.
For instance, there wasn’t any insight into the inner workings of any character nor were their motives fully explored.
Also, the very formal voice felt out of place at times and despite the audiobook’s narrator having done a wonderful job I felt like the writing did not reflect the time period well enough and the dialogue was in-cohesive and abrupt probably, due to the translation being unable to fully capture the essence of the language it was written in.
Waliya is mostly referred to as “the widow” instead of by name not sure if it’s a culture thing but that really felt odd.
There are a lot of little tangents throughout the story that were interesting and added to making the story a memorable one.
⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️
“There are moments in one's life when everything one considers to be a win is for all practical purposes a loss.”
jessieadamczyk's review against another edition
2.0
One of dozens of others I've read that confuse important subject matters with good story telling.
The style is clunky, with paragraph after paragraph listing events. The dialogue has all the feeling of a pile of sawdust. Very little about the story makes sense or works.
The style is clunky, with paragraph after paragraph listing events. The dialogue has all the feeling of a pile of sawdust. Very little about the story makes sense or works.
sumunun's review against another edition
challenging
emotional
tense
- Plot- or character-driven? Plot
- Strong character development? It's complicated
- Loveable characters? No
- Diverse cast of characters? Yes
- Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes
1.0
plantbirdwoman's review against another edition
3.0
Nuruddin Farah is a celebrated Somali novelist who is often mentioned as a contender for the Nobel Prize for Literature. He frequently writes about the effects and costs of terrorism in today's world and when he does, he speaks from personal experience. His sister, who was a nutritionist working for UNICEF, was murdered along with at least 20 others in a bomb attack by the Taliban on a restaurant in Kabul 2014.
Despite his fame in the literary world, I was unacquainted with him before reading this book. I saw a review of it several weeks ago and was fascinated. I immediately added it to my reading queue.
Farah's protagonists here are far away from the centers of terrorism in the 21st century. They are an expatriate Somali couple, Mugdi and Gacalo, living in Oslo. Mugdi had been an ambassador for Somalia in Norway back when Somalia was a recognizable and organized country. When the country tore itself apart in civil war and descended into chaos, they became part of the Somali diaspora and sought refuge in Norway, eventually becoming citizens.
This all happened back in the 1990s and Mugdi and Gacalo, along with their son and daughter, made a comfortable life for themselves in Oslo. But their Norwegian-raised son, in his years of rebellion, joined a radical Islamic cell in Oslo and eventually fled to Somalia to pursue jihad. He became involved with the terrorist organization Al Shabaab and assisted in several terrorist attacks. Eventually, he blew himself up in a suicide attack in Mogadishu.
Mugdi is shocked and disgusted by news of his son's activities and his manner of dying. He wants nothing to do with his memory and says, " How can I mourn a son who caused the death of so many innocent people? I explode into rage every time I remember what he did."
For Gacalo though, her son is still her son, regardless of what he did and she had made a promise to him that if he should die, she would take care of his wife and his two stepchildren. She honors that commitment and makes arrangements to bring them to Oslo.
The widow, Waliya, is a devout Muslim, although she had not always been so observant. Mugdi and Gacalo are cultural but not practicing Muslims. Clashes seem inevitable.
The two stepchildren, a boy and a girl, are twelve and fourteen years old when they arrive. Though Mugdi and Gacalo have a prickly relationship with the mother, they become loving grandparents to these two traumatized children.
The war between Mugdi/Gacalo and Waliya is a stand-in, a model, of the global clash between fundamentalism and secularism. Farah writes of this relationship in intimate and nuanced terms. The result is an incisive and withering portrait of a family soap opera. In revealing how a family falls apart, he gives us a representative of how the nation falls apart. It is a powerful story.
Unfortunately, the prose here does not rise to the level of the story that is being told. It is often clunky and less than graceful. There's no indication that the book was translated and so I assume it was written in English but the language often seems clumsy and filled with cliches. Moreover, the dialogue given the various characters, particularly the teenagers, frequently seems dissonant with unlikely phrasing.
Initially, I thought to rate the book at four stars because it is an interesting story with well-developed characters, but the more I thought about it, the more I was bothered by that clunky writing. So, three stars it is.
Nevertheless, it was a worthwhile read with its view of how the families of violent jihadists are affected by that member's actions. It is perhaps something that we don't often consider, but they, too, can be victims.
Despite his fame in the literary world, I was unacquainted with him before reading this book. I saw a review of it several weeks ago and was fascinated. I immediately added it to my reading queue.
Farah's protagonists here are far away from the centers of terrorism in the 21st century. They are an expatriate Somali couple, Mugdi and Gacalo, living in Oslo. Mugdi had been an ambassador for Somalia in Norway back when Somalia was a recognizable and organized country. When the country tore itself apart in civil war and descended into chaos, they became part of the Somali diaspora and sought refuge in Norway, eventually becoming citizens.
This all happened back in the 1990s and Mugdi and Gacalo, along with their son and daughter, made a comfortable life for themselves in Oslo. But their Norwegian-raised son, in his years of rebellion, joined a radical Islamic cell in Oslo and eventually fled to Somalia to pursue jihad. He became involved with the terrorist organization Al Shabaab and assisted in several terrorist attacks. Eventually, he blew himself up in a suicide attack in Mogadishu.
Mugdi is shocked and disgusted by news of his son's activities and his manner of dying. He wants nothing to do with his memory and says, " How can I mourn a son who caused the death of so many innocent people? I explode into rage every time I remember what he did."
For Gacalo though, her son is still her son, regardless of what he did and she had made a promise to him that if he should die, she would take care of his wife and his two stepchildren. She honors that commitment and makes arrangements to bring them to Oslo.
The widow, Waliya, is a devout Muslim, although she had not always been so observant. Mugdi and Gacalo are cultural but not practicing Muslims. Clashes seem inevitable.
The two stepchildren, a boy and a girl, are twelve and fourteen years old when they arrive. Though Mugdi and Gacalo have a prickly relationship with the mother, they become loving grandparents to these two traumatized children.
The war between Mugdi/Gacalo and Waliya is a stand-in, a model, of the global clash between fundamentalism and secularism. Farah writes of this relationship in intimate and nuanced terms. The result is an incisive and withering portrait of a family soap opera. In revealing how a family falls apart, he gives us a representative of how the nation falls apart. It is a powerful story.
Unfortunately, the prose here does not rise to the level of the story that is being told. It is often clunky and less than graceful. There's no indication that the book was translated and so I assume it was written in English but the language often seems clumsy and filled with cliches. Moreover, the dialogue given the various characters, particularly the teenagers, frequently seems dissonant with unlikely phrasing.
Initially, I thought to rate the book at four stars because it is an interesting story with well-developed characters, but the more I thought about it, the more I was bothered by that clunky writing. So, three stars it is.
Nevertheless, it was a worthwhile read with its view of how the families of violent jihadists are affected by that member's actions. It is perhaps something that we don't often consider, but they, too, can be victims.