Knots by Nuruddin Farah

She had never imagined she will see the day when she will appreciate the very thing she has always taken for granted--a clean washroom, the toilet system functioning, the bathroom floor immaculate, towels on the rails. She is comforted at the thought of being in an impeccable one for the first time since her arrival, and she is flushed with joy. It goes to show that only a corrupt society tolerates living in such filth, especially the men who put up with the muck they have made, as if dirt makes itself, reproduces itself. No woman with the means to do something about it will endure so much grunge. Her mother has always said that you are as clean as you make yourself.

Cambara is a Somali woman who, until recently, has been living in Toronto. Riven with grief at the death of her son, who drowned in a pool while her husband was having an affair, she has returned to Mogadiscio to reclaim her family property from the warlords who have appropriated it. She begins her journey at the house of Zaak, her former husband, whom she once married to help receive immigration papers. Zaak has been back in Mogadiscio for a long time, and his state--dirty, selfish, addicted to the stimulant qaat--is a representation, she feels, of the degradation of her country. Zaak is a lost cause, but there are other allies waiting to assist her, such as Kiin, the hotel operator, Bile, a handsome young defense contractor, and, for some reason, an Irish woodworker named Seamus. Cambara's plan is to inveigle her way back into the property when the warlords are out warlording, set up a defensive perimeter, and then put on a puppet show. As this process develops, she semi-adopts a couple of child soldiers to fill the hole in her life left by her son's death.

Farah's depiction of Mogadiscio is one of remarkable decline, but also one in which resilient and resourceful actors understand how to live within the ruined city. Kiin and the others are members of a network of women who provide each other mutual support in the absence of a functioning government. The warlords, interestingly, are largely kept off the page: we learn, for example, that Cambara's guards have killed a couple of the warlords' agents, but Farah's focus is on the helpers, not the villains, and a showdown I'd long expected with the warlord himself who had until lately been living in Cambara's family home never materializes. This is a novel about building and restoring, starting with the filthy shit-covered bathroom that serves as a representation of what the warlords have down to Somalia and Mogadiscio. They are, quite literally, filth.

I was shocked by how bad the prose in this book is. Several of the blurbs on the back describe Farah as a candidate for the Nobel Prize! But the prose struck me as written by someone without a genuine command of the English language, or a high school kid who's a little too attached to the thesaurus. Mixed metaphors, overly ornate but imprecise word choice abound. One character is described as having "long-term chicaneries hatching on the back burner." A typical sentence goes like this: "Nonplussed, she surrenders herself to the unbecoming mixed emotions knocking at the door of her brain." And once you notice it, you can't stop noticing it. In the passage above for example, isn't "grunge" a really strange choice? I found the whole thing actually quite baffling for a glossy major-publishing house release, and for an author with not a little bit of critical praise. Anyway, with the addition of Somalia, my "Countries Read" list is up to 114.