![]() ![]() It has echoes of Shakespearean plays and elements of classic Greek plays with its use of a collective chorus speaking for all with one voice, but the deployment of a lack of puntuation in parts of the storytelling made reading this difficult until I became accustomed to it. Maaza Mengiste's blend of poetic and lyrical historical fiction and fact that focuses on little known aspects of the beginnings of WW2 is an extraordinary and gripping literary accomplishment but nevertheless proved to be a challenge to read. If you felt differently about any of these reads, you might very well feel differently about The Shadow King as well. ![]() This one fits snugly below Marlon James for me. Toward the end of this year's bonanza lies a cluster of novels I found problematic but which inspired others: Mostly Dead Things, Black Leopard, Red Wolf, and Freshwater. I realize this is partly a case of misplaced expectations, but those expectations have been set for anyone who picks up the book.Įach year I keep a (nerdy) running list of the books I've read, ranking them accordingly. This is more of a domestic drama placed before a backdrop of foreign invasion, and that is less interesting to me. We see more of a household requisitioned for the front lines than of a community of women marching off to war. If this novel is meant to honor and showcase the role of women warriors in Ethiopia's fight for sovereignty (and that is its advertised claim), why do we only get details about Aster, Hirut, and "the cook" (among whom the latter two are only brought to battle as indentured servants and only participate by choice late in the game)? Why give us the names and autobiographies of almost twenty of Kidane's men but leave Aster's women nameless, faceless, and mere ciphers? We learn more of Seifu's wife, Marta, and a whore named Mimi (neither of whom are fighting) than of a third female combatant named Nardos. By the time I comprehended her motives, I was already tired of the Wujigra as plot element. There's no sense of its talismanic importance to Hirut until after she's lost it, so her manic fixation on finding it once more precedes our understanding of why she is so driven. It doesn't help that the reader first learns of this weapon as it's being claimed (stolen) by another character. I began to refer to the novel as "The Foreshadow King" and, in this regard, Mengiste did not disappoint. By page 40 I was already dreading the inevitable return of the gun to its "rightful owner". Hirut's obsession with her stolen Wujigra rifle felt heavy-handed. The presence of birds (usually blackbirds or crows, mostly wheeling overhead) is another descriptor Mengiste reaches for repeatedly and which also lost power. Perhaps I am more sensitive than most, enjoying the gloom of the Pacific Northwest rainforest, but it was rare to go more than two or three pages without finding yet another invocation of the light. This device occurs with such predictable frequency that it is rendered meaningless as a descriptive tool. The constant descriptions of light striking objects, illuminating characters, or traveling across landscapes became stale. "Here he is, gifting himself the freedom to tremble." "This has always been at the center of his reckoning: that the beast is strongest in the quiet, that it gnaws first at its own throat, and all those men who search for its presence in treacherous sound will be destroyed by what rests mute in bright corners."Īnd, eventually, even phrases that could work well lie relatively inert on the page: When taken to extremes the meaning of a passage becomes obscured, or lost altogether: I believe most stories suffer as a result, and this novel is arguably an example of that. When strung along for 424 pages, they place the focus on the writer's MFA training and not the story. Such passages, in isolation, make for perfect pull-quotes. She is a girl who has been split, and what stands here is both flesh and shadow, bone and silhouette, no more than air filled with smoke. Highly poetic wording is applied to everything, creating an atmosphere that is clearly intended to be rich but which smothered me with its heavy floral perfume. My biggest gripe is that I found the writing overwrought in a way that was suffocating. I gradually began to resent the book's claim on my time and credulity, and that is never a good sign. For me it was often an effort to pick up again. But I would remove the book jacket promise of this being "unputdownable". There is some wonderful - sometimes stunning - descriptive writing. ![]() I learned more about Ethiopian history and culture than I knew before. This is a story that deserves to be told. ![]()
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