Name: Beneath the Lion's Gaze
ISBN: 9780393071764

Maaza Mengiste

After his physician father, Hailu, is ordered to report to jail for helping a victim of state-sanctioned torture to die and his younger brother, Dawit, joins an underground resistance movement, Yonas prays to God for an end to the violence that has its grip on Addis Ababa, Ethiopia, and the rest of the country on the eve of revolution in 1974.

A Novel

Beneath the Lion's Gaze

Shona Tiger

Beneath the Lion's Gaze opens in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia, 1974, on the eve of a revolution. Yonas kneels in his mother's prayer room, pleading to his god for an end to the violence that has wracked his family and country. His father, Hailu, a prominent doctor, has been ordered to report to jail after helping a victim of state-sanctioned torture to die. And Dawit, Hailu's youngest son, has joined an underground resistance movement-a choice that will lead to more upheaval and bloodshed across a ravaged Ethiopia. Maaza Mengieste's powerful debut tells a gripping story of family and of the bonds of love and friendship set in a time and place that has rarely been explored in fiction. It is a story about the lengths to which human beings will go in pursuit of freedom and the human price of a national revolution. Emotionally gripping, poetic and indelibly tragic, Beneath the Lion's Gaze is a transcendent story that introduces a powerful new voice.

Jessica Smith

This is a bit of a tough read at times, with a great many gruesome torture scenes, but ultimately I found it compelling. It follows a particular well-to-do family in Ethiopia during the "revolution" and terror of the 1970s, along with some of their acquaintances – all in all it amounts to a huge and unwieldy cast. Unfortunately this means that most of the characters seem rather two-dimensional, but the sheer breadth of the work distracted me from that while reading.

This novel's main strength is the unflinching detail in describing the horror of dictatorship. It's really unfortunate that within the text such dictatorship is equated with "communism", as if intense repression was in any way the same thing as the democratic control of society by the working class, but y'know, Stalinism (and McCarthyism too, I suppose) should really take the blame for that. The other problem with the novel is that there are some rather unbelievable twists in the plot ((view spoiler)[mostly where the Colonel apparently had his own daughter arrested for handing out pamphlets, and she somehow without his authorisation got brutally tortured? how exactly was that supposed to have worked?! (hide spoiler)]), as well as some turns that just didn't seem to come from anywhere. But nonetheless, I thought the novel evoked imagery very well – images of Ethiopia, of totalitarian regimes, etc.

I'd really feel more comfortable giving this three and a half; four seems too generous but three too harsh, considering that despite all the flaws I mentioned above I still found this gripping. I guess I would recommend this more as dystopian fiction than historical, and if you're coming at it from that interest, you'll probably enjoy it more.

Beneath the Lion's Gaze A Novel

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