Revisiting Nuruddin Farah’s From a Crooked Rib

Abstract

Freshman novels are a strange species and often suffer strange fates. They can be memorialized either as the genesis of greatness or as a listless but necessary step toward that greatness. In the event that the critical reception of a first novel leans toward the latter assessment, much can be lost or ignored. First novels may not always be the most masterful artistically, but they are the product of some stimulus that prompts an author to commit to paper and to discover through the process of writing. They are the first time an author finds something pressing enough to embark on the testing voyage of fashioning a work of art. This is why I will pay another visit to an African novel that launched the remarkable career of one of the continent’s finest crafters of the art form, but one that has, because of its deceptive simplicity, generally eluded critics.

We are trying to build a microscopic replica, a female defense machine, against the experiences and the experiments and the lies of the State.

—The Absent City, Ricardo Piglia