Great African Reads discussion

Welcome to our first official read for this project!

I have an audio recording of the novel ready to go and am looking forward to listening to it. I also just read this review in the NYT. It provides some nice background for understanding the context of the novel as well as some nice commentary on the writers of Africa's younger generation as they confront the post-colonial era.

Welcome, Hattie! :)

I've got my copy ready from the library though I'll have to squeeze it in amongst other reads. Hoping to start in the next few days...

Hattie, good to see you here!

Muphyn, I think the book will move fast for you. I am moving a little slowly because I already broke my one-audiobook-at-a-time rule. :/

I'm about 3/4's way through and I'm enjoying it. I am listening to the audio version and do think i might have a look at the actual book and re-read some parts. I think it was a great book for "conflict." Obviously it's about the civil war in Ethiopia, but there is a lot of other conflict too: inter-generational conflict, sibling conflict, conflict in friendships, etc...

Marieke wrote: "I'm about 3/4's way through and I'm enjoying it. I am listening to the audio version and do think i might have a look at the actual book and re-read some parts. I think it was a great book for "con..."

I read this book a couple of years ago. I too liked the book for the conflicts but what it intrigued me most about the book was the centering around the everyday lives of people/families where every breathing moment needed to be calculated for survival. Knowing the big picture events is one thing but seeing its effects on an individual/family level is another matter.

Yes! I totally agree. I also just read "House of te Mosque" with another group and it's about what happens to a family from the time of the Shah's White Revolution through the 1979 Islamic Revolution in Iran. I really appreciated "seeing" how pivotal events and changing fortunes affected a family.

SPOLIER

I too am reading this immediate after House of the Mosque, so another family saga under stressful political change.

I have just finished the first part of this book which shows the family as it deals with private tragedy, the death of the doctor's wife, the sickness of his grandaughter amidst the tensions in the country at large following famine, soldier's uprising and the eventual dismissal of the monarchy. As far as I have been able to tell the famine, uprising and removal are all historical fact, including the open question of how exact the emperoro died. I think the writers interplay the personal tragedy and the public one well together - we see their different reactions and feelings to the family death and especially through the eyes of the son's childhood friend Mickey the horros of the famine and the brutalism of Derg commanders. As I read now the start of the second part I sense a further hint at this in the (as yet?) not fully told story of son Dawit's girlfriend Lily - I am thinking something horrid happened to her after she was sent to the country - do other's sense this as well?

When the author writes about the imprisonment of the Emperor I thought she encapsulated both the awe in which ordinary Ethiopians held their Emperor and the endlessness of solitary imprisonment - “He’d been taken to the great hall that had once belonged to the late Emperor Zewditu.All of the furniture had been emptied out of the big room and onlu a small cot with thin sheets and a blanket sat in its center. Soldiers were posted outside his door, which was locked in triplicate and then chained. Their fear of him was heartbreaking, compounding his loneliness and the largeness of this empty space he was trapped inside. They walked backwards into the room whenever they escorted his old servant inside with his food, doubly armed and wearing sunglasses. They scurried out as quickly as they could, too afraid to glance his way. The mournful whispers of his old lion, Tojo, lulled him to sleep, and he tried to make himself forget about the garden just outside his window which he was no longer allowed to walk in. Under the weight of this solitude, all the emperor’s hours, minutes, and seconds blurred and ran together like a slow, dying river.” Similarly at the end of Part One when we see Mickey being threatened at gun point, one of his comrades having already been so threatened and killed, to force him to perform the execution.

So far I am liking the story and the book has some beatiful passages.

Just started this - a rare sunny day amidst the storms in the UK - kitchen window open, cuppa tea, the sound of birds and a great opening to the book, think I'm going to enjoy and race through it.

Hi Amanda, weird isn't it amongst all the floods and rain to be sitting under blue skies. I'm in Halesowrth in Suffolk and actually sat outside at the coffee shop this morning! Enjoy the read.

It was quite bizarre, Sheila. Not going to complain though. Thoroughly enjoying the read, my first as part of this group.

We are under a deluge of snow, rain and sleet over here across the pond. Now windows open! Lol.

I'm so glad you are both enjoying the book! I won't say more until you've finished, but I really enjoyed it.

Great book set during the overthrow of the Ethiopian Empire in 1974, as viewed through a fictional family. Selassie was a poor ruler, but things quickly go from bad to worse during this revolution. The family at the center of the novel is already going through their own personal struggles and now they find themselves involved in the chaos of their country in different ways. I found some parts difficult, due to the violence, but overall I thought it was a very good,