Oromay

Praise

Praise for Oromay

“Reading Baalu Girma’s novel Oromay sent me back to the time when I first watched the film Casablanca. No, it’s not about the similarity of the plot. It’s the same surefire set of ingredients that draws you into the story and makes you empathize with the characters. Eritrea in the 1980s, war, junta, coffee shops where local spies and CIA agents drink coffee, a love story . . . A gripping novel that has ‘documentary’ flavor.”
—Andrey Kurkov, Booker-longlisted author of The Silver Bone

“Oromay is a startling, intimate and gripping saga of war-time Ethiopia turned topsy-turvy. Its cast of quirky characters, as quick to spout revolutionary rhetoric as to deploy cutthroat maneuvers, imbues the narrative with tension, humor and dramatic heft. This fierce but also tender-hearted story unveils a revolution being hollowed out by the hypocrisies, cheap sloganeering and moral fudginess of its ostensible stewards. In his brave dissection of rampaging power and evasive language, Girma recalls George Orwell and Aldous Huxley.”
—Okey Ndibe, author of Foreign Gods, Inc.

“Oromay by Baalu Girma is a fictionalized account of one of the deadliest episodes of Ethiopia’s war against Eritrea. . . Against a backdrop of divided allegiances, a treacherous world of espionage and bureaucratic nightmare, a love affair is born but the violence, tyranny and corruption surrounding the couple threaten to devour everything they hold dear. Oromay, a novel widely believed to have cost its author his life, is a prayer against war, oppression and the erosion of our humanity. David DeGusta and Mesfin Felleke Yirgu did an outstanding job, giving the world access to one of the most important and enduring works of literature in Ethiopia.”
—Djamila Ibrahim, author of Things Are Good Now

“Ethiopia has spent a hundred years composing extraordinary novels in Amharic, yet virtually none have been translated into English. David DeGusta and Mesfin Felleke Yirgu have provided the world a service by translating Oromay by Baalu Girma, one of the most important novels in Amharic. Banned within days of publication, this thinly veiled roman à clef by a former propagandist about Ethiopian government repression in Eritrea details the roguish main character’s increasing disillusionment as he witnesses the bureaucracy of occupation and the horrors of war. In an admirably natural English, this lively translation captures the humor and verve of the original. The translators revel in all the strengths of this dialog-driven war journalism story and its sharp social observations about who sacrifices the most humanity, oppressor or oppressed.”
—Wendy Laura Belcher, co-translator of The Hatata Inquiries