The Ethiopian Exhibition - Reviews

"Astride a battered motorcycle, John Twelve crosses the mysterious Ethiopian desert, where at night women become phosphorescent, glowing like the flowers, birds, and animals whose luminescent "sexual organs . . . produce a kind of incense." He encounters Haile Selassie, the Queen of Sheba, Prester John, a rock star named Fang, hookers in Mickey Mouse T-shirts, and a lovely American girl under the sway of Ahmed, the assassin. Or so it seems in this elegant and sensuous but needlessly ambiguous work of magical realism. As it happens, Ahmed is a director making a movie called The Ethiopian Exhibition about "a man who foolishly crosses Ethiopia. On a motorcycle." The others are actors. Maybe. They all make their way to Emperor Selassie's summer palace followed by Nazis, tourists, and children deformed by the local chemical plant to shoot the final scene in which John, played by Fang, throws himself, naked, over the parapet onto the village square. Maybe. Recommended for literary fiction collections."

- Ron Antonucci, Hudson Lib. Library Journal Copyright 1994 Reed Business Information, Inc