Claire Messud
In times of transition, clarity can be hard to come by, and a lucid observer is invaluable. Such rare voices can seem, in the hubbub, easy to ignore: It has been almost twenty-five years since Bill McKibben wrote The End of Nature, and yet, rather like the Tank Man of Tiananmen Square, his valiant protest has—so far—failed to halt the juggernaut. Each book by Michael Ondaatje is, thrillingly, a departure, in some way unclassifiable. He is by no means a fantasist, but in the manner of a lyric poet (which he is also), he deploys juxtaposition and silence, as well as language and narrative, to create new worlds and new thoughts out of the real. Books like In the Skin of a Lion, Running in the Family, The English Patient, Anil’s Ghost, and Divisadero are fictions that provoke and unsettle as much as, and even sometimes more than, they delight. In Ondaatje’s work, predictable boundaries are always in question: Is this That Maaza Mengiste’s Beneath the Lion’s Gaze is all but un-put-downable is a feat for any novel, and perhaps especially for a debut, but it is all the greater an accomplishment given that not a single cheerful event brightens this book’s nearly four hundred pages. Set in Addis Ababa during Ethiopia’s darkest days in the mid-1970s, from the fall of Emperor Haile Selassie through the reign of terror imposed by the Derg, the revolutionary council that seized power in Selassie’s wake, Mengiste’s remarkable novel is a catalogue of miseries and brutalities as relentless as any I have encountered in recent