3 ideas
It still sold widely in Amharic and made its author both a critics' favourite and a popular novelist. It is a concrete counterexample to the assumption that formally difficult fiction can only find a small, elite readership, especially in a non-European literary market.
A child does not experience life as a sequence of causes and consequences. A child experiences it as sensations, fears, and fragments linked by resemblance and feeling. Stream-of-consciousness narration reproduces this associative structure directly, so the form itself carries the child's way of perceiving instead of an adult narrator explaining it afterward.
The book's sales show that readers will take on fragmentation and interiority when the material is intimately familiar, such as their own city, language, and childhood textures. Publishers' fears that readers need linear plots underestimate them. The book shows that recognizable subject matter can pay for unfamiliar form.