The Private Apartments by Idman Nur Omar

Google “What happened in Somalia in 1991?” and the internet will give you various nuanced (or not-so-nuanced) answers. Basically, the central military-led government collapsed, and an ongoing civil war began. Populations dispersed. Idman Nur Omar’s new subtle short story collection, The Private Apartments, begins in 1991 and features multi-layered stories of Somali women dispersed to Europe and Canada by this conflict.

“The eight stories in the collection include some recurring characters, but the stories are not linked by plot.”

The eight stories in the collection include some recurring characters, but the stories are not linked by plot. The stories are identified by location and year. For example, the opening story is titled, Rome, 1991 and the concluding story is Toronto, 2020. The in-between stories are London, 1998; Welland, 2000; Toronto, 2005; Amsterdam, 2008; Toronto, 2011; and Dubai, 2016. Though the inciting incident of the 1991 conflict recedes, its consequences trend through the decades.

Many of the characters in the collection feel suspended in a kind of bardo-like state, neither part of their environment nor apart from it. In the Amsterdam story, this sense of entrapment in fragmented lives is reflected in multiple characters. Narrated by a 10-year-old girl, the story tells how her widowed mother befriends an elder Somali widower whose family managed to move on the United States, yet he remains in the Netherlands because of this legal status as a refugee. Meanwhile, the girl’s half-brother connects with her long-lost Italian father, whom the reader first met in the opening story from Rome.

A common theme is uncertainty and the characters’ search for stability. A number of characters comment that they’d expected their lives to go differently. The characters find love, get married, have children, yet behind it all is a feeling of things falling apart. Expectations are thwarted. A sense of disappointment prevails. Wedding fantasies recur as hope and failure. As the title hints, these are stories that peek into the private lives of women. Fans of Elena Ferrante would do well to seek out this collection.

IDMAN NUR OMAR was born in Rome and immigrated to Canada in 1991. She has an MFA in creative writing from the University of Guelph and an MA in English Literature from Concordia University. She lives in Calgary, where she teaches at the Southern Alberta Institute of Technology in the Communication and Liberal Arts Studies Department.

Publisher ‏ : ‎ Astoria (May 2 2023)
Language ‏ : ‎ English
Paperback ‏ : ‎ 192 pages
ISBN-10 ‏ : ‎ 1487011385
ISBN-13 ‏ : ‎ 978-1487011383

Michael Bryson

Michael Bryson has been reviewing books since the 1990s in publications such as The Kitchener-Waterloo Record, Paragraph Magazine, Id Magazine, and Quill & Quire. His short story collections include Thirteen Shades of Black and White (1999) and The Lizard and Other Stories (2009). His fiction has appeared in Best Canadian Stories and other anthologies. His story Survival is available as a Kindle single. From 1999-2018, he oversaw 78 issues of fiction, poetry, reviews, author interviews, essays, and other features at The Danforth Review. He lives in Scarborough, Ontario, and blogs at Art/Life: Scribblings.