Novel
Abyssinian Chronicles
Abessijnse kronieken
Moses Isegawa · 1998
Synopsis
Mugezi, a cunning narrator born in 1961, grows up in Uganda from the 1960s to the 1990s. In the village, he lives between his father Serenity, emotional and suspicious, his mother Padlock, a former nun who runs a household of twelve children with an iron hand, and a formidable grandfather. When the family moves to Kampala, at the moment Idi Amin takes power, he enters the seminary, an image of the authoritarian regime, then survives by his wits, as a brilliant pupil, a teacher, a smuggler, while the country sinks into war.
Context
Written in English, the novel appeared first in Dutch, in Amsterdam, in 1998, and sold more than a hundred thousand copies in the Netherlands, which earned the author an invitation to Parliament; the English edition appeared from Knopf in 2000. Kirkus Reviews compares it in ambition to Salman Rushdie's Midnight's Children, while regretting a hasty last hundred pages; Maya Jaggi, in The Guardian, praises its biting eye and the freshness of its language.
Who it is for
For reading a vast fresco of postcolonial Uganda, from Obote to Amin and beyond, in the voice of a child of the country.
Prizes and reception
Richard Eder, in The New York Times, judged it split in two, stronger as a chronicle of Uganda than as a coming-of-age novel.
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