“Nuruddin Farah’s ninth novel in English, Links, makes a mainly para-textual use of Dante’s Commedia, implicitly validating its canonical status both within Italian literary tradition and world literature as a whole. The epigraphs chosen for each part of the book come from Dante’s Inferno, except the first three exergues…

“Through the references to Dante’s Commedia, Jeebleh’s journey is configured from the beginning as a descent to hell, represented by the city of Mogadishu during the civil war.” [. . .]    –Simone Brioni, Lorenzo Mari, Postcolonial Dante: Reading the Commedia in Mogadishu, 2019

Access Links by Nuruddin Farah here.

Contributed by Simone Brioni (Ph.D., Stony Brook University)