Novel · A way to begin
አዲስ አለም
Not translated into English
Heruy Wäldä Sellasie · 1932
Synopsis
Awwaqa is born in Tegulet, a village that the narrative portrays as remote and backward. Eager for learning, he takes service with a Frenchman passing through and follows him to France, where he spends eight years studying languages and sciences. Homesickness brings him back, but his family and neighbours cannot bear his new ideas: he attacks the customs, the festivities he judges unworthy, and a clergy he holds to be corrupt, praises the telephone and the phonograph, and even brings the quarrel before an assembly of priests.
Context
The novel was published in Addis Ababa in 1932, by the Goha Ṣäbah press. It turns into narrative the programme of the reformers of its generation: to educate, to correct customs, to reform the clergy. The linguist Jack Fellman, who studied it in 1994, notes a simple plot, a rapid narrative and a clear language from which every foreign word is banned, even though the hero returns from Paris laden with the objects and ideas of Europe.
Who it is for
A short novel in Amharic, with no known French translation. Its characters carry ideas rather than personalities, and the narrative reads like a demonstration.
Prizes and reception
Fellman regards it as the second novel in Amharic, after Afäwärq's; others reserve that rank for a narrative by the author published a year earlier.