Good evening!
I’m writing this sitting on the floor pushed up against my heater because it is soooo unbelievably cold, but I will still maintain that this weather is much better than the disgusting British heat. Hope you’re all keeping warm, wherever you are!
If you’d like to buy me a coffee, on Ko-Fi, you can do here 🙂
What I’ve been reading this week and what I think about it
I’m not completely done with Maaza Mengiste’s The Shadow King (2019), but I’m near the end so I feel like I can talk about it at some length. I’ve had an interesting experience with this novel, mostly positive. Mengiste is an extremely talented writer; at a sentence level she has a wonderful poetical edge that sets the difficult subject matter off nicely. On the other hand, I think she has some trouble with narrative, but it wasn’t enough of an issue for me to not enjoy the novel overall.
The Shadow King is set in Ethiopia during the Italian invasion of 1935, with some flash-forwards to the early ‘70s as one character looks back on the events of the story. Its primary focus is on Hirut, a girl who has lost both of her parents and goes to work for a wealthy couple, the husband (Kidane) of which they were close friends with. She is uncomfortable in their home, living in close quarters with the cook, despised by Kidane’s wife Aster and watched closely by Kidane. In the background, Mussolini’s army is on the advance, ready to reclaim their former colony as fascism strengthens in Europe.
The initial set up of the history that the novel focuses on is considered and flows really nicely with the close character studies, but I think the plot gets a bit too big for this to be sustained. It’s a novel that keeps going and going, with more characters, more events, more themes constantly coming at its reader. This made some of the plot a bit baggy and not wholly unbelievable, which is a shame because the events in it are really, really interesting and do a good service to Ethiopia’s history.
One of the characters that I particularly liked was that of Ettore, an Italian man who takes photos -- first as a hobby, then as a command by his Italian superior, the ‘butcher of Benghazi’ Colonel Carlo Fuccelli, who wants him to document the sadistic prison and killing methods he inflicts on captured native people. Ettore has real moments of introspection and regret as he takes these photos, but he is also able to push this aside. The complexity in his particular situation is how he is Jewish, and he worries about his parents in Italy, who he fears will be impacted by the growing antisemitic rhetoric and political action across Europe. Mengiste’s placing of Ettore within this setting, where people are being butchered for nothing more than living in a country under siege, feels pointed. We’re given full permission to feel sympathy for Ettore and his situation, with solid backstories given to his parents, especially his father’s migration from Ukraine, so I don’t think it’s the case that Mengiste is comparing atrocities -- rather, it lets us see the full force of fascism and how far-reaching it was even before the twentieth century, and how its violence was exported all over the world. Ettore very much has a textual function, in that he brings in the multi-faceted nature of Italian politics at the time, where even he, who is ‘doing work for the Empire’ is not spared its violence because he is also cast as the other.
A strength I think The Shadow King has was how it picks up on how impactful small gestures can be. Somebody’s laugh in the face of asserted dominance or a yawn in the face of sexual violence have the most jarring effects on individual characters and their actions. Asserting your feeling, and, in many repeated instances, simply saying your name, as a rebuttal to the worst behaviours that other people can exhibit towards you is sometimes the only power that these people have. It makes it clear that fighting is not always about physical violence, which is reasserted in how there are many characters, such as Kidane, who could easily have been cast as ‘good’ people because of which ‘side’ they are on, but are not. The complexities of these characters are not skimmed over, which I thought was done well.
More next week!
Books on my radar
The same as last week - Ka Bradley’s The Ministry of Time and Rebecca K Reilly’s Greta and Valdin. I need to pick up the pace!