African Writers
1 primary work • 4 total works
Book 226
Winner of the 1980 English-Speaking Union Literary Award
The first novel in Farah's universally acclaimed Variations on the Theme of an African Dictatorship trilogy, Sweet and Sour Milk chronicles one man's search for the reasons behind his twin brother's violent death during the 1970s. The atmosphere of political tyranny and repression reduces our hero's quest to a passive and fatalistic level; his search for reasons and answers ultimately becomes a search for meaning. The often detective-story-like narrative of this novel thus moves on a primarily interior plane as "Farah takes us deep into territory he has charted and mapped and made uniquely his own" (Chinua Achebe).
Winner of the Neustadt International Prize for Literature
Farah's landmark Variations on the Theme of an African Dictatorship trilogy is comprised by the novels Sweet and Sour Milk, Sardines, and Close Sesame. In this volume, the second of the three, a woman loses her job as editor of the national newspaper and then finds her efforts to instill her daughter with a sense of dignity and independence threatened by an oppressive government and the traditions of conservative Islam.
Sardines brilliantly combines a social commentary on life under a dictatorship with a compassionate exploration of African feminist issues.
FROM A CROOKED RIB is a beautiful, sparse, subtle account of the experience of a girl named Ebla, who runs away from her rural family, settles in Mogadishu, the capital, and marries an educated man with unhappy results. Told with complete conviction from a woman's point of view, the story is a moving celebration of the human spirit and challenge to traditional male chauvinism.
