22 of 22 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
More than just a story of cruelty, war and terror..., February 24, 2001
This is a memoir of the author's boyhood and young manhood in Ethiopia. Born in 1958 to a middle-class family in the city of Jijiga, Mr. Mezlekia left Ethiopia in 1980 and is now a professional engineer living in Toronto. Narrated with a light touch and a mixture of myth and fantasy, he opens a world for the western reader that has too long been influenced by nothing more than photos of skeletal images of starving children and grinding poverty.
This story, however, is much more than that. From the start, there's a wide variety of interesting characters and a rich warm family life. There's Mustafa, the swindler, who boards at his home; there's Mr. Alula, the teacher, whose severe forms of discipline call for retribution by boyhood pranks; there's Wondwossen, his childhood companion, who joins a guerilla army with him; there are his sisters who never stop feuding. But most memorable of all is his mother, who holds her family together during the extreme hardships which inevitably come to this violent and war-torn land.
He was 14 yeas old in 1972, a time when idealism and student protests were sweeping the globe. In Ethiopia, however, students were gunned down and murdered. Young Nega was jailed often and regularly, and always tortured, but somehow his descriptions of this time in his life are told with a touch of lightness. Years later, in 1977, when over 100,000 people are murdered in seven months during the "Red Terror" and bodies laid out over the streets, he yearns for the time when they were all just simply tortured. Throughout the book, I couldn't help shuddering at the all the cruelty. From the brutality of the schools, to scenes in the hospital where patients were beaten, to the way that monkeys were slaughtered, I found it disturbing how easily such things were taken for granted.
Although Mr. Mezlekia does his best to describe the political situation, I found it hard to follow the various juntas and guerillas and political parties. The fantasies and myths, which I usually don't care for in literature, seemed very right for this book however. It was a constant reminder to me that this story did not come from a western author. Mr. Mezlekia is truly a witness to his times. He has certainly widened my understanding of his world.
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22 of 23 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Disturbing in its Calm, December 12, 2000
Wow. People may shudder at the comparison, but this book reads a lot like Angela's ashes. There is comedy in what most would call tragic situations. The story is, at times, gut-wrenchingly sad, but the narrator rarely reflects upon it as such. A funny, bright, evocative book that doesn't play either the "Africa-is-mystical&beautiful" game or the "Africa-is-savage-and-primal" card. Frankly, I'm glad, because both are a bit tried. Good book, good read.
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11 of 11 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Notes That Matter, June 22, 2004
This book is full of meaning, often insightful and completely unforgettable it is written with candor and wit despite its serious edges.
Nega Mezlekia has written a memoir about his boyhood growing up in Ethiopia during the fall of Emperor Selassie. He experiences all of the curious playful things that all boys are reared with yet he also discusses the harshness of the environment during the rise of Junta communism in which thousands of young people were ruthlessly slaughtered. He writes on page 183, "Apathy in the face of continual violence is something someone who has never lived through a war cannot understand......People simply gathered about themselves, like rags, what life there was left, deafened and inured to the inevitability of death." Although Mezlekia has many horrible atrocities to write about this is not all he adheres to. At times this memoir is very witty and I laughed out loud several times imagining some of his shenanigans. His adventures with medicine men and native cures is hilarious as well as his attempt to capture the loose cattle in his village with pepper.
I am always impressed with the attitude of Africans who survive the atrocities they have faced in their home countries. Their spirit and survivalist hearts seem to always prevail despite the horrible circumstances they are often forced to endure. Mezlekia managed to escape his country at possibly its worst moments, not without heartache, not without suffering, but with a true gift as a storyteller. I would recommend this memoir to everyone interested in a great true tale but especially to those concerned with the plights of our fellow human beings who suffer so gracefully for their native lands.
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