Beneath the Lions Gaze

Posted on 12 May 2017 by Maaza Mengiste

An epic tale of a father and two sons, of betrayals and loyalties, of a family unraveling in the wake of Ethiopia s revolution This memorable, heartbreaking story 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 upheaval and bloodshed across a ravaged Ethiopia Beneath the Lion s Gaze tells a gripping story of family, 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 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 and powerful debut Free Read [ Beneath the Lions Gaze ] author [ Maaza Mengiste ] – kino-fada.fr This novel is set in Ethiopia s capital city, Addis Ababa, in the late 1970 s It s the last days of Christian Emperor Haile Selassie who successfully led the fight against Mussolini s soldiers spears vs tanks Ethiopia today is still two thirds Christian Coptic and one third Moslem But now a military takeover has occurred and the communists are in power, a group known as the Derg Cuba, East Germany, USSR and North Korea become their allies, sending financial...Let s be real here a lot of what we Westerners know of Ethiopia is based on those late night aid commercials soliciting support for starving children with distended bellies and flies swarming their faces This is incredibly problematic Maaza Mengiste s Beneath The Lion s Gaze flies in the face of that monolithic stock image of the country and gives a richly drawn description of Ethiopian life before the 1974 revolution that many people know little or nothing about.This is the story of a f Let s be real here a lot of what we Westerners know of Ethiopia is based on those late night aid commercials soliciting support for starving children with distended bellies and flies swarming their faces This is incredibly problematic Maaza Mengiste s Beneath The Lion s Gaze flies in the face of that monolithic stock image of the country and gives a richly drawn description of Ethiopian life before the 1974 revolution that many people know little or nothing about.This is the story of a family set against the overthrow of Emperor Haile Selassie, and is easily one of most gripping books I ve read in a very long time It looks baldly at the beauty of Ethiopian culture a strongly family, community, and faith centered way of life , Ethiopian history Ethiopia proudly off Italian ...This book has a tone and the best word I have for it is sombre I felt Mengiste s Ethiopia to be grand, dignified, ancient, steeped in its rich mythopoesis The graceful prose seems to move glacially from idea to idea, image to image, never becoming fevered or fragmenting as its subjects do The segments from the viewpoint of Haile Selassie seem entirely appropriate in this mood What I m saying might sound like distance, the vertical perspective of a strategy game, but the texture here is also This book has a tone and the best word I have fo...I Had this book for a really long time but never got round to reading it Now that i m done im kinda wondering why it took me so long The book is about the Ethiopian revolution as seen though the eyes of a fictional family in the time period The author goes to great lengths to get the reader to understand what each of the characters are going through before , during and after the revolution.i really felt l...Beneath the Lion s Gaze begins in 1974 during the last days of Emperor Haile Selassie s despotic rule of Ethiopia Told through the fates of members of a well educated family it conveys the chaos, contradictions and violence that beset the country.As the story starts, the people of Ethiopia are literally dying of starvation as an aged and aloof Emperor goes about business as usual Then seemingly overnight Emperor and officials are seized, murdered or detained and a new struggle begins The ne Beneath the Lion s Gaze begins in 1974 during the last days of Emperor Haile Selassie s despotic rule of Ethiopia Told through the fates of members of a well educated family it conveys the chaos, contradictions and violence that beset the country.As the story starts, the people of Ethiopia are literally dying of starvation as an aged and aloof Emperor goes ...First, the cover is not doing this book any favors I assumed it was a memoir, probably of a child soldier or something.Even once I realized this was a novel, I didn t have high expectations for it I was expecting another earnest but poorly written book published on the strength of covering awful events in a time and place most Americans know little about As it turns out, I did like the bookthan expected.Beneath the Lion s Gaze is set in 1970 s Ethiopia, a time of enormous upheaval foll First, the cover is not doing this book any favors I assumed it was a memoir, probably of a child soldier or something.Even once I realized this was a novel, I didn t have high expectations for it I was expecting another earnest but poorly written book published on the strength of cov...I loved the characters and the setting was highly compelling But I neededplot I really really neededof a plot You ve got to have something happen, and that has to be shown as it s happening Too many time whenever there was movement in the plot it was shown as FLASHBACK 8 No.Generalmente me pregunto si quieren quitar a Pe a Nieto, a qui n podr an Las Revoluciones sirven cuando se sabe qui n es el siguiente, cuando hay un l der que busca el bien com n, la historia nos ha ense ado que eso no pasa y que desgraciadamente el Poder h...A farmer plows a land that isn t his, that was never his father s, which was never his grandfather s, and will never be his son s.Beneath the Lions Gaze is the story of the Ethopian Revolution in the mid 1970s, from the point of view of multiple characters It opens with a doctor operating on another gunshot victim, while reflecting on his youngest son s involvement in the war, and his wife, dying of cancer in the same hospital The son gets caught up in the resistance, and the doctor euthanizes a torture victim of the regime It took me a long time to get into this book I picked it up andread about 20 pages of and put do Beneath the Lions Gaze is the story of the Ethopian Revolution in the mid 1970s, from the point of view of multiple characters It opens with a doctor operating on another gunshot victim, while reflecting on his youngest son s involvement in the war, and his wife, dying of cancer in the same hospital The son gets caught up in the resistance, and the doctor euthanizes a torture victim of the regime It took me a long time to get into this book I picked it up andread about 20 pages of and put down, and tried to go back to it, twice, before slogging through it I did think Mengiste was able to convey the political situation without a lot of long involved history, and there were certainly many exciting moments, but on the whole I was bored And then, about halfway through, I was very worried for the characters and found myself genuinely caring for Dawit The torture scenes were hard to read I liked the twist on the significance of the girl Hailu eut...

English
12 May 2017

Maaza Mengiste