Fitawrary Woldu, his nobleman father, holds traditional beliefs and travels to St Abbo's Shrine on Mount Zuqualla in the hope of finding a cure for his heart disease.
An early reader, Ros de Lanerolle, noted that the story was a mechanism to "expose decaying society, politically brutal, static and uncaring, corrupt and privilege-ridden.
[3] Wren concludes: "Young Goytom’s horrible journey with the decaying corpse of Ethiopia’s past, naturalistic as it seems, is the final symbolism of the novel.
"[4] Its release in Ethiopia was disrupted amid concerns that it would be censored by the government of Haile Selassie, with small numbers reportedly sold under the counter of the United Nations bookshop in Addis Ababa.
[2] In an early review, Payne concludes: "Worku's novel is hampered by an apparent unfamiliarity with English as an expressive medium and almost completely fails, with a few noteworthy exceptions, on an emotional (passionate?)
Drawing on a range of contextual information including records from the AWS and from the University of Iowa's International Writing Program (IWP), this essay invites a reconsideration of this important Ethiopian text.
Despite the ubiquitous decadence and violence of the narrative, the essay asserts that reconciliation emerges as a dominant theme, and that the novel thus offers a noteworthy instance of a writer's moral imagination at work at a time of conflicted transition.