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Summary
Summary
With the threat of Mussolini's army looming, recently orphaned Hirut struggles to adapt to her new life as a maid in Kidane and his wife Aster's household. Kidane, an officer in Emperor Haile Selassie's army, rushes to mobilize his strongest men before the Italians invade. His initial kindness to Hirut shifts into a flinty cruelty when she resists his advances, and Hirut finds herself tumbling into a new world of thefts and violations, of betrayals and overwhelming rage. Meanwhile, Mussolini's technologically advanced army prepares for an easy victory. Hundreds of thousands of Italians--Jewish photographer Ettore among them--march on Ethiopia seeking adventure.
As the war begins in earnest, Hirut, Aster, and the other women long to do more than care for the wounded and bury the dead. When Emperor Haile Selassie goes into exile and Ethiopia quickly loses hope, it is Hirut who offers a plan to maintain morale. She helps disguise a gentle peasant as the emperor and soon becomes his guard, inspiring other women to take up arms against the Italians. But how could she have predicted her own personal war as a prisoner of one of Italy's most vicious officers, who will force her to pose before Ettore's camera?
What follows is a gorgeously crafted and unputdownable exploration of female power, with Hirut as the fierce, original, and brilliant voice at its heart. In incandescent, lyrical prose, Maaza Mengiste breathes life into complicated characters on both sides of the battle line, shaping a heartrending, indelible exploration of what it means to be a woman at war.
Reviews (5)
Publisher's Weekly Review
Mengiste (Beneath the Lion's Gaze) again brings heart and authenticity to a slice of Ethiopian history, this time focusing on the Italian invasion of her birth country in 1935. While Hirut, a servant girl, and her trajectory to becoming a fierce soldier defending her country are the nexus of the story, the author elucidates the landscape of war by focusing on individuals--offering the viewpoints (among others) of Carlo Fucelli, a sadistic colonel in Mussolini's army; Ettore Navarra, a Jewish Venetian photographer/soldier tasked with documenting war atrocities; and Haile Selassie, the emperor bearing the weight of his country's devastation at the hand of the Italians. In Hirut, Mengiste depicts both a servant girl's low status and the ferocity of her spirit--inspired by the author's great-grandmother who sued her father for his gun so she could enlist in the Ethiopian army--which allows her to survive betrayal by the married couple she serves and her eventual imprisonment by Fucelli, captured with horrifying detail by Navarra's camera. Mengiste breaks new ground in this evocative, mesmerizing account of the role of women during wartime--not just as caregivers, but as bold warriors defending their country. (Sept.)
Booklist Review
Mengiste's indelible first novel, Beneath the Lion's Gate (2010), put Ethiopian historical fiction on countless best-of, must-read, and award lists. Her monumental new novel draws inspiration from her great-grandmother, who as the eldest and in Mulan-style answered Emperor Haile Selassie's demand for first sons to fight against Fascist Italy despite her father's objections, insisting that her brothers were too young. In her author's note, Mengiste explains that her brave predecessor represents one of the many gaps in European and African history,"" namely, ""Ethiopian women who fought alongside men."" In1974 in the novel, just before Selassie is dethroned, Hirut arrives in Addis Ababa bearing a box filled with the many dead that insist on resurrection. Almost four decades earlier, in 1935, Hirut was an orphaned servant who followed her master, Kidane, and his wife, Aster, into battle against Mussolini's invading troops. The women are initially relegated to being caretakers but prove themselves to be fierce as warriors. Hirut eventually plays servant to the titular Shadow King, a stand-in for the secluded emperor, who remains safe in England while his country bleeds. Mengiste's extraordinary characters shrewd Kidane, militant Aster, the enigmatic cook, narcissistic Italian commander Fucelli, conflicted photographer Ettore, elusive prostitute Fifi, even haunted Selassie epitomize the impossibly intricate ties between humanity and monstrosity, and the unthinkable, immeasurable cost of survival.--Terry Hong Copyright 2010 Booklist
Guardian Review
The eponymous king in Maaza Mengiste's second novel does not feature until a good halfway through the narrative, and then in appropriately shadowy fashion. He is Minim, a "soft-spoken man with the strange name that means Nothing", one of those who has answered the Ethiopian emperor Haile Selassie's call to arms provoked by the Italian invasion of the country in 1935. But Minim has an unexpectedly propitious quality; a close resemblance to Selassie, now in exile in Bath, that can be used to reinvigorate popular confidence that the European colonialists can be defeated. Dressed in a makeshift uniform and sitting on horseback with a red umbrella across his saddle, Minim has only to appear in the hills so recently dominated by Italian troops to strengthen his subjects. As he is instructed by the comrade who has helped to hatch the plan: "To be in the presence of our emperor is to stand before the sun. You must respect his power to give you life and burn you alive." A different novel might put this curious interlude at its heart; fiction as written by a popular historian such as, say, Ben Mcintyre. But in Mengiste's story - which draws on her own family history, with a grandfather who fought against the Italians - shadows and echoes abound and multiply, ensuring that although its participants are faced with clear and present danger, they continue to be intimately bound to the generations and individuals that have gone before them. When the book begins, we imagine that its arena might be small, and confined. We are in a compound, in which tensions seethe between Hirut, an orphaned young woman who has recently joined the household as a sort of maid of all work, and her mistress, Aster. Hirut's arrival has been effected by Aster's husband, Kidane, an old friend of Hirut's parents; Aster is both suspicious of their past connection and grieving deeply for the child she and Kidane have lost. Initially, the reader's sympathies seem clearly directed: towards the vulnerable Hirut and protective Kidane, and away from the capricious and occasionally malicious Aster. Their battles, worked out in a series of claustrophobic rooms, including the minute bedroom that Hirut shares with a cook and the more luxurious quarters given to the elegant Aster, are painful and without prospect of resolution. But circumstances change, and rapidly. In Eritrea and Somalia, Italian commanders are mobilising their forces to reprise their attempts to control Ethiopia, first thwarted in the 1890s; now, under Mussolini's mythologising aegis, they are ready to try once again. For the Ethiopian men, such as Kidane, who gather their own forces to repel the invaders, that first conflict is still present in their minds, and its reprisal presents them with a chance to avenge their fathers' defeats. What, though, of the women? In a scene of extreme marital disharmony near the beginning of the book, Aster makes clear her refusal to wait at home for her husband's return. Subsequently she dons his tunic, jodhpurs and cape and sets off to war in blazingly described fashion, taking Hirut with her. The story that follows - predominantly one of the cat-and-mouse game between Italian and Ethiopian forces - is interspersed with fragments: descriptions of the documentary photographs taken by a young Venetian soldier, Ettore; brief glimpses of Selassie in Bath, as he contemplates the potential destruction of his rule and, by way of comfort, devotes himself to listening to the opera Aida; and the interjections of a Greek-style chorus. Alongside the story of Hirut, Aster and Kidane comes that of the Jewish Ettore, exiled from his family and only latterly learning of his father's own exile from his native Russia. As he waits for letters from his parents, he is confronted by the news that Jewish soldiers will be required to register their ethnicity, and begins to receive reports of growing antisemitism at home. It is both a reasonably conventional narrative - there is plenty of action, detailed description and a focus spread between the principal characters - and a subtly unpredictable one. History and modernity are juxtaposed in the factual asymmetries of warfare (the Ethiopians must rely on outdated and often malfunctioning weapons and have no way of long-distance communication beyond running messengers). They are also set side by side in the modes of consciousness that all the characters experience. While their instincts for battle, whether attack or defence, seem rooted in the primal, they are constantly having to adjust and update their viewpoints. For the Italians, the building of a great Roman empire must be captured on film; for the Ethiopian resistance, gender lines must be blurred for a greater chance of success. In her afterword, Mengiste notes that recollections of the war tend to cohere around the heroism of the outnumbered Ethiopian soldiers, "stoic and regal like my grandfather". It was only much later that she discovered that her great-grandmother had taken her father's gun and gone to war herself - one of the women whose stories "even today have remained no more than errant lines in faded documents". Her achievement in The Shadow King is to bring to life those women, and to depict them as dynamic entities, their capabilities, limitations and beliefs evolving under duress in as fully complex a way as those of their male counterparts.
Kirkus Review
An action-filled historical novel by Ethiopian American writer Mengiste (Beneath the Lion's Gaze, 2010).The Italians who invaded Ethiopia in 1935 under the orders of the man whom the conquered people insist on calling, in quiet resistance, Mussoloni came aching to avenge a loss they had suffered 40 years earlier. They might have remembered how fiercely the Ethiopians fought. Certainly the protagonist of Mengiste's story, a young woman named Hirut, does. In a brief prologue, we find her returning to the capital, where she has not been for decades, in 1974, in order to find an audience with the emperor, Haile Selassie, who is just about to be overthrown. She has a mysterious box, inside of which, Mengiste memorably writes, "are the many dead that insist on resurrection." The box comes from the war nearly 40 years earlier, and it is an artifact full of meaning. Hirut was nothing if not resourceful back then: A servant in a wealthy household, she becomes a field nurse, but as the war deepens, she takes up arms and becomes a fighter herself, "the brave guard of the Shadow King"the Shadow King being a villager who bore a reasonable enough resemblance to the emperor, who has gone into hiding, to be dressed like him, taught his mannerisms, and sent out in public in order to rally the dispirited Ethiopian people. "There are oaths that hold this world together," Mengiste writes, "promises that cannot be left undone or unfulfilled." Such is the oath that the emperor broke by fleeing the fight. Mengiste is a master of characterization, and her characters reveal just who they are by their actions; always of interest to watch is the Italian colonel Carlo Fucelli, who is determined to win glory for himself, and a soldato named Ettore Navarra, who has learned Amharic and wants nothing more than to live a quiet life, preferably with Hirut by his side. Hirut herself is well rounded and thoroughly fascinatingand not a person to be crossed.A memorable portrait of a people at wara war that has long demanded recounting from an Ethiopian point of view. Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Library Journal Review
As you likely know, Mussolini's Italy invaded Ethiopia in the 1930s during the buildup to World War II after a late 19th-century invasion resulted in Italy's humiliating defeat. Much of the Ethiopian population rose in arms to fight this second invasion; Emperor Haile Selassie decreed that women were to accompany the fighting men, originally as helpmeets, but the women evolved into a fighting force. Mengiste's fictionalized history follows a young orphan woman, Hirut, a servant of Ethiopian fighter Kidane and his warrior wife, Aster. Hirut becomes a skilled soldier and is the brains behind a clever ruse that rallies the Ethiopian troops. When she is briefly captured, a tenuous alliance forms between her and an Italian soldier, Navarra, a regimental photographer under orders to document his sadistic Italian commander's atrocities. Navarra, who is Jewish, grows increasingly horrified by his own complicity with the fascists. VERDICT Mengiste's (Beneath the Lion's Gaze) tale of Ethiopian women warriors is fascinating and tension-filled. Her prose style is to show rather than tell, with short, cinematic chapters dense with imagery and sensory detail. Descriptions of the fog of battle are exquisite and horrific, all the more remarkable for being told from a woman's point of view. Highly recommended. [See Prepub Alert, 3/4/19.]--Reba Leiding, emeritus, James Madison Univ. Lib., Harrisonburg, VA