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Summary
Summary
From acclaimed author Dinaw Mengestu, a recipient of the National Book Foundation's 5 Under 35 award, The New Yorker 's 20 Under 40 award, and a 2012 MacArthur Foundation genius grant, comes an unforgettable love story about a searing affair between an American woman and an African man in 1970s America and an unflinching novel about the fragmentation of lives that straddle countries and histories.
All Our Names is the story of two young men who come of age during an African revolution, drawn from the safe confines of the university campus into the intensifying clamor of the streets outside. But as the line between idealism and violence becomes increasingly blurred, the friends are driven apart--one into the deepest peril, as the movement gathers inexorable force, and the other into the safety of exile in the American Midwest. There, pretending to be an exchange student, he falls in love with a social worker and settles into small-town life. Yet this idyll is inescapably darkened by the secrets of his past: the acts he committed and the work he left unfinished. Most of all, he is haunted by the beloved friend he left behind, the charismatic leader who first guided him to revolution and then sacrificed everything to ensure his freedom.
Elegiac, blazing with insights about the physical and emotional geographies that circumscribe our lives, All Our Names is a marvel of vision and tonal command. Writing within the grand tradition of Naipul, Greene, and Achebe, Mengestu gives us a political novel that is also a transfixing portrait of love and grace, of self-determination and the names we are given and the names we earn.
Author Notes
Dinaw Mengestu was born in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia in 1978. In 1980, he, his mother, and his sister immigrated to the United States to join his father, who fled Ethiopia during the Red Terror. He graduated from Georgetown University and Columbia University's MFA program in fiction. He is the author of The Beautiful Things That Heaven Bears and How to Read the Air. He has also written for several publications including Rolling Stone and Harper's.
(Bowker Author Biography)
Reviews (6)
Publisher's Weekly Review
Immigrant stories are often about self-invention, but in his latest novel, in which an African escaping to America cannot leave his past behind, McArthur Fellow Mengestu (How to Read the Air) portrays the intersection of cultures experienced by the immigrant with unsettling perception. Each of the two narrators-one speaking from the past in Africa, one in present-day America-has a relationship with a young man named Isaac, and the two take turns describing these relationships. The African narrator, a 25-year-old aspiring writer, recounts how he leaves his rural village to subsist on the margins of a university in a city that he simply calls "the Capital." There, he finds a friend in the magnetic Isaac, a young revolutionary who draws him into an antigovernment insurgency. The second narrator is Helen, a Midwestern social worker, who takes under her wing and into her heart an African refugee named Isaac, knowing little about his situation and nothing of his history. The action is set after the first flush of African independence, as democratic self-rule proves elusive, while in America racial and social divides persist. In Africa, Isaac, the revolutionary, endures beatings and torture before confronting his own side's penchant for violence. In America, Helen and the man she calls Isaac face their own intractable obstacles. Mengestu evokes contrasting landscapes but focuses on his characters-Isaac, the saddened visionary; Isaac, the secretive refugee; Helen, the sympathetic lover-who are all caught in a cycle of connection and disruption, engagement and abandonment, hope and disillusion. Agent: P.J. Mark, Janklow & Nesbit Associates. (Mar.) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.
Booklist Review
Mengestu's previous novels (The Beautiful Things That Heaven Bears, 2007; How to Read the Air, 2010) established him as a talented writer interested in the imaginations, memories, and interpersonal collisions of African immigrants in the U.S. His latest, which presents the parallel narratives of a melancholy social worker in the American Midwest and a bookish witness to revolutionary violence in Uganda, returns to themes of alienation and exile but also explores the challenges and possibilities of love amid bleak circumstances. Both of his protagonists are drawn to a man named Isaac. Both stories take place in the early 1970s, a time of conflict in African states emerging from colonial rule as well as a time of persistent racial tensions in the U.S. The author highlights the dense slums of Kampala with the same intensity as he does the flatness of his midwestern farm town. But Mengestu is less interested in photographing a particular historical moment than he is fascinated by the dangers each setting imposes upon his vulnerable protagonists and their fragile relationships. And in the end, despite the bleak settings, tenderness somehow triumphs.--Driscoll, Brendan Copyright 2014 Booklist
New York Review of Books Review
all three of Dinaw Mengestu's novels are about people who, for various reasons, come to this country and fashion new lives. But it would be a huge mistake - it would be an insult, in fact - to call him a novelist of "the immigrant experience" or a chronicler of "life on the hyphen" or any of the other shabby, summary clichés deployed to characterize (and too often diminish and even dismiss) authors whose birth certificates identify them as foreign-born. For while questions of race, ethnicity and point of origin do crop up repeatedly in Mengestu's fiction, they are merely his raw materials, the fuel with which he so artfully - but never didactically - kindles disruptive, disturbing stories exploring the puzzles of identity, place and human connection. Mengestu began this exploration with his dazzling first novel, "The Beautiful Things That Heaven Bears," and extended it in "How to Read the Air." Good as they were, those books now look like warm-up acts. For with "All Our Names," he has grounded his search in a story so straightforward but at the same time so mysterious that you can't turn the pages fast enough, and when you're done, your first impulse is to go back to the beginning and start over. "All Our Names" employs two narrators, Isaac and Helen, whose very different tales alternate throughout the novel. Isaac's story begins when he leaves his home in Ethiopia to attend college in Uganda in the early 1970s. Colonialism is dead, but the era of the dictators is looming, and like so many young Africans at that time, Isaac is intoxicated by the possibilities of new beginnings and self-invention. "When I was born," he says, "I had 13 names. Each name was from a different generation, beginning with my father and going back from him. I was the first one in our village to have 13 names. Our family was considered blessed to have such a history." For his part, though, Isaac feels burdened if not cursed by his patrimony. "I felt as if I had been born into a prison," he says, and he implored his father for years, ultimately successfully, to send him away to school. "I went to Addis Ababa, and then took buses to Kenya and Uganda. I was no one when I arrived in Kampala; it was exactly what I wanted." Helen is the social worker assigned to Isaac's case when he arrives as a foreign exchange student in the Midwestern college town where she works. To her, he is pure mystery, an immigrant with no past, a client of social services whose folder contains only "a single loose leaf of paper. ... There was no month or date of birth, only a year. His place of birth was listed only as Africa, with no country or city. The only solid fact was his name, Isaac Mabira, but even that was no longer substantial: Any name could have filled that slot, and nothing would have changed." But if Isaac is an enigma to Helen - someone "made of almost nothing, not a ghost but a sketch of a man I was trying hard to fill in" - she is also something of a stranger to herself, an unreflective product of Midwestern mores. Even her own name has no resonance for her: "My father named me Helen for reasons he said he couldn't remember." Helen's account begins when Isaac arrives in her town. His starts years earlier, when he is drawn into the revolutionary fervor burning through the campus in Kampala, the city and ultimately the whole country. Mengestu, who seems to have been born knowing how to play with time in a novel, interweaves these two stories, so we witness Helen's budding curiosity about Isaac at the same time he is describing the events that will eventually land him in America with a past he is at pains to conceal. Both stories are about love. In Helen's case, it's her romance with Isaac. In Isaac's, it's his platonic devotion to another Isaac, a fellow student who leads him ever further into politics and ultimately bloodshed. By setting his narratives back-to-back in the early to mid-1970s, Mengestu manages to make race and questions of racial identity the unifying threads tying these two very different love stories together. In the wake of colonialism, Isaac and his college compatriots wrestle with such questions almost constantly: Are they nationalists, Pan-Africans or something else? For Helen, notions of identity were nebulous at best before she met Isaac, and race wasn't much of an issue. "We weren't divided like the South and had nothing to do with any of the large cities in the North," she explains. "We were exactly what geography had made us: middle of the road, never bitterly segregated, but with lines dividing black from white all over town, whether in neighborhoods, churches, schools or parks. We lived semi-peacefully apart, like a married couple in separate wings of a large house." Then, in one of the book's most unsettling scenes, a lifetime of complacent naïveté dissolves in the time it takes to eat a meal. A couple of months after they first meet, Helen takes Isaac to the local diner she's frequented since childhood. In her mind, the diner is part of a mental checklist of places she's taken him - places where she has been with him publicly and, so far, without incident. But she's failed to inform him of this agenda, and when he asks, "Why are we here?" she can only reply, "No particular reason." From that point, things deteriorate in a hurry. First their waitress asks if they would like their meal to go. Isaac immediately realizes what is happening and, "polite yet determined," refuses to leave. Then the food arrives: his omelet on a stack of thin paper plates accompanied by plastic utensils, her fried chicken much later, on the same china everyone else is using. By this point, Helen is more than ready to flee, but Isaac insists that she finish the meal - his way, she realizes, of punishing her for using him like a prop: "When I finally looked up at Isaac after a few minutes and saw him smiling at me, I knew there was something slightly cruel lurking in his gaze." Isaac is a man, we come to realize over the course of the novel, who has had everything taken from him - his friends, his culture, even his name. Like most of the immigrants in Mengestu's fiction, he has not come to America to find the land of opportunity; he has come because he has nowhere else to go, and because there is nothing to go back to. His story's harshest irony is that he begins by rather archly turning his back on his past, by styling himself an outsider, only to see everything in his subsequent self-creation stripped from him bit by bit. By the time he arrives in America, all he knows is that he can take nothing for granted, that nothing is ever settled. Knowledge is the only power Isaac has, and he wields it like a weapon to awaken Helen to the dangers of their affair. But while she, like Isaac, is feckless at the outset, she is not fickle, and she remains faithful to him despite his riddlesome secrecy and their shared awareness that their romance has no future. If their relationship is one of shared dependencies, it is also, in very different ways, redemptive for them both. So yes, superficially, "All Our Names" is a book about an immigrant, but more profoundly it is a story about finding out who you are, about how much of you is formed by your family and your homeland, and what happens when those things go up in smoke. There is great sadness and much hard truth in this novel, as there is everywhere in Mengestu's fiction. But like the best storytellers, he knows that endings don't have to be happy to be satisfying, that mysteries don't need to be explained, that discriminating between what can and can't be known is more than enough. And he is generous enough to imbue his characters with this awareness as well. Neither Isaac nor Helen winds up contented or happy, but their respective pain endows them both with sufficient clarity to tell their stories without a trace of deceit. The victories in this beautiful novel are hard fought and hard won, but won they are, and they are durable. The protagonist styles himself an outsider, only to see his self-creation stripped from him. MALCOLM JONES is the book editor at The ¿¿¿ ¿¿¿¿ ¿¿¿¿ ¿¿ ¿¿¿ ¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿ ¿¿ ¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿ ¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿ ¿¿ ¿¿¿ ¿¿¿ ¿¿¿¿ ¿¿ ¿¿¿¿¿¿¿ ¿¿ ¿¿¿¿ ¿¿¿ ¿¿¿¿ ¿¿ ¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿ ¿¿ ¿¿¿ ¿¿¿¿ ¿¿¿¿¿¿¿ ¿¿ ¿¿¿ ¿¿¿¿¿¿¿ ¿¿¿¿ ¿¿ ¿¿¿ ¿¿¿ ¿¿¿¿¿¿¿ ¿¿¿¿¿ ¿¿ ¿¿¿¿¿¿¿ ¿¿ ¿¿ ¿¿¿¿ ¿¿¿ ¿¿¿ ¿¿¿¿¿¿¿ ¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿ ¿¿¿¿¿ ¿¿ ¿¿¿¿ ¿¿ ¿¿¿¿¿¿ ¿¿ ¿¿¿¿¿¿ ¿¿¿¿¿¿ ¿¿¿¿¿¿¿ ¿¿¿ ¿¿¿¿ ¿¿ ¿¿¿ ¿¿¿¿¿ ¿¿ ¿¿¿¿¿¿¿ ¿¿¿¿¿¿¿ ¿¿ ¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿ ¿¿¿¿ ¿¿ ¿¿¿ ¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿ ¿¿ ¿¿¿ ¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿ ¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿ ¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿ ¿¿¿¿ ¿¿¿ ¿¿¿ ¿¿ ¿¿¿¿ ¿¿ ¿¿¿ ¿¿¿¿ ¿¿ ¿¿¿¿¿¿¿ ¿¿ ¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿ ¿¿¿ ¿¿ ¿¿¿¿¿ ¿¿ ¿¿¿¿ ¿¿ ¿¿¿ ¿¿¿¿ ¿¿¿¿¿¿¿ ¿¿¿ ¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿ ¿¿¿¿ ¿¿¿¿¿¿¿ ¿¿ ¿¿¿¿ ¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿ ¿¿ ¿¿¿ ¿¿¿¿ ¿¿¿¿¿ ¿¿¿¿¿ ¿¿¿¿ ¿¿¿ ¿¿ ¿¿¿¿¿¿ ¿¿ ¿¿¿¿ ¿ ¿¿¿¿¿¿ ¿¿ ¿¿¿¿¿¿ ¿¿¿¿¿ ¿¿ ¿¿¿ ¿¿¿¿¿¿¿ ¿¿ ¿¿¿¿¿ ¿¿¿¿¿¿¿ ¿¿¿ ¿¿¿¿¿ ¿¿¿¿ ¿¿¿¿ ¿¿¿¿¿¿ ¿¿ ¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿ ¿¿ ¿¿¿ ¿¿¿¿¿¿¿ ¿¿¿ ¿¿ ¿¿¿ ¿¿¿¿¿¿¿ ¿¿¿ ¿¿¿ ¿¿¿¿¿¿¿ ¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿ ¿¿ ¿¿¿ ¿¿¿¿¿¿¿ ¿¿¿ ¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿ ¿¿¿¿¿¿¿ ¿¿¿ ¿¿¿¿¿ ¿¿¿¿¿¿ ¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿ ¿¿¿¿ ¿¿¿¿¿ ¿¿¿¿¿¿¿ ¿¿¿ ¿¿ ¿¿¿¿¿¿¿ ¿¿ ¿¿¿¿¿ ¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿ ¿¿ ¿¿¿ ¿¿ ¿¿¿¿¿¿ ¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿ ¿¿ ¿¿ ¿¿¿¿¿ ¿¿ ¿¿¿¿ ¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿ ¿¿¿¿¿ ¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿ ¿¿¿ ¿¿¿¿ ¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿ ¿¿¿¿ ¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿ ¿¿¿¿ ¿¿¿ ¿¿¿¿¿¿ ¿¿ ¿ ¿¿¿¿ ¿¿¿¿¿ ¿¿ ¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿ ¿¿¿ ¿¿¿¿ ¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿ ¿¿ ¿¿ ¿ ¿¿¿¿¿ ¿¿¿¿¿ ¿¿¿¿¿¿¿ ¿¿¿ ¿¿¿ ¿¿¿ ¿¿¿¿ ¿¿¿¿¿ ¿¿¿ ¿¿¿¿ ¿¿ ¿¿¿ ¿¿ ¿¿¿¿¿¿ ¿¿ ¿¿¿¿ ¿¿¿¿¿¿ ¿¿¿ ¿¿¿¿ ¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿ ¿¿¿ ¿¿¿¿ ¿¿¿¿¿¿¿ ¿¿¿¿ ¿¿¿¿¿ ¿¿¿¿¿¿ ¿¿ ¿¿ ¿¿ ¿¿¿¿¿¿ ¿¿¿¿¿ ¿¿ ¿¿¿¿¿ ¿¿¿¿¿¿¿ ¿¿¿ ¿¿¿¿ ¿¿¿¿ ¿¿¿¿¿ ¿¿ ¿¿¿¿ ¿¿¿¿¿¿ ¿¿ ¿¿¿¿¿ ¿¿ ¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿ ¿¿ ¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿ ¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿ ¿¿¿ ¿¿¿¿ ¿¿¿ ¿¿¿¿ ¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿ ¿¿ ¿¿¿¿¿ ¿¿¿¿ ¿¿¿¿¿¿¿ ¿¿¿¿¿ ¿¿¿¿ ¿¿ ¿¿ ¿¿¿¿¿ ¿¿ ¿¿ ¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿ ¿¿¿¿ ¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿ ¿¿¿¿¿ ¿¿¿¿ ¿¿ ¿¿ ¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿ ¿¿¿¿ ¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿ ¿¿¿¿¿¿¿ ¿¿¿¿ ¿¿¿ ¿¿¿ ¿¿¿¿¿ ¿¿ ¿¿¿¿¿ ¿¿ ¿¿¿¿ ¿¿¿¿ ¿¿¿¿¿¿¿ ¿¿¿ ¿¿ ¿¿ ¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿ ¿¿¿¿¿¿ ¿¿ ¿¿¿¿¿ ¿¿¿ ¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿ ¿¿¿¿ ¿¿¿¿ ¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿ ¿¿ ¿¿¿¿¿ ¿¿¿¿¿¿¿ ¿¿¿¿¿ ¿¿¿ ¿¿¿¿¿ ¿¿¿¿¿ ¿¿ ¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿ ¿¿ ¿¿¿¿¿¿ ¿¿¿ ¿¿¿¿¿ ¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿ ¿¿¿¿ ¿¿¿¿¿¿ ¿¿¿¿ ¿¿¿¿ ¿¿¿¿ ¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿ ¿¿¿¿¿¿¿ ¿¿ ¿¿¿¿ ¿¿¿¿¿ ¿¿¿¿¿¿¿ ¿¿¿¿¿¿¿ ¿ ¿¿¿¿¿ ¿¿ ¿¿¿¿¿¿¿ ¿¿¿ ¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿ ¿¿ ¿¿¿¿ ¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿ ¿¿¿¿¿ ¿¿¿ ¿¿¿¿ ¿¿¿¿¿¿ ¿¿¿ ¿¿¿¿ ¿¿¿¿ ¿¿¿ ¿¿¿ ¿¿¿¿ ¿¿¿¿ ¿¿¿ ¿¿¿¿ ¿¿¿ ¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿ ¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿ ¿¿¿¿¿¿ ¿¿¿¿¿¿¿ ¿¿ ¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿ ¿¿¿¿ ¿¿ ¿¿¿ ¿¿¿ ¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿ ¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿ ¿¿¿¿ ¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿ ¿¿¿¿¿ ¿¿ ¿¿¿ ¿¿¿¿ ¿¿¿¿¿¿ ¿¿ ¿¿¿ ¿¿¿¿¿ ¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿
Guardian Review
A few years ago, passing through Kampala, I met a man who had worked for over 40 years on the baggage carousel at Entebbe airport, surviving all manner of coups, civil wars and bloodletting. When I asked him how he had survived, he said: "I tried to stay nondescript, wearing only a white shirt and black trousers whatever the occasion, always looking down at my shoes when soldiers or important men passed by. And I never had a pretty girlfriend or even looked at girls when soldiers were around." As I waited for my luggage to disgorge from the handling area, he looked about, before whispering in my ear: "And I still follow this policy." One of the narrators of All Our Names is a character a little like this. In fact this new novel by the Ethiopian-American writer Dinaw Mengestu, who won the Guardian first book award for Children of the Revolution, has two narrators. It is set in the 1970s, in Uganda and the American midwest. The narrator of the African sections is an Ethiopian who has travelled down to Uganda through Kenya, having shed the 13 ancestral names his father gave him. We know him briefly and intermittently only as Langston (after Langston Hughes) or the Professor, both names given to him by his militant friend Isaac. The pair hang about the fringes of the university in Kampala, then in the grip of revolutionary fervour. A born survivor, who saves his skin by appearing to extinguish his ego, "Langston" drifts along, trying to keep out of trouble. But eventually he gets drawn into military activity by Isaac, who becomes involved in a coup attempt and a series of brutal acts. The other narrator, Helen, works for the Lutheran Relief Services in an invented midwestern town called Laurel, a place where conservatism and racism lurk near the surface. Here she embarks on an affair with an African immigrant named Isaac, whom at first we presume to be the Isaac of the Ugandan sections. For their love to flourish, the couple must combat the prejudices of the town, and those of her family and colleagues. They must also deal with the anguish and horror he has seen, and is constantly trying to escape from, mainly through wit and charm. Eventually the truth about his identity emerges, though careful reading would have revealed this to us very early in the book. What's fascinating about All Our Names is the unsettling way it engages with history - both the history of Uganda and literary history. Those with the right knowledge will be able to place this novel in an exact historical context, but that's rather beside the point: the president is not named as Amin; the university is not called Makerere; there are odd moments when events of 1972 and 1979 are conflated; there is (maybe) a still greater displacement of elements of the Great Lakes refugee crisis of the mid to late 90s. It does not matter that these different time periods seem to creep into the story - it's all kept deliberately vague. This is a book trying to pull away from fixed dates and places just as Helen's Isaac is trying to locate his sense of self without reference to location or the events of his past. Similar dramas of displacement and exile are rehearsed in NoViolet Bulawayo's Booker-shortlisted We Need New Names. Both titles speak to the shifts and residues of lives in flux - sometimes out of choice, sometimes out of necessity. As in Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie's Americanah, the focus is partly on how US race issues subsume a variety of identity questions arising from an African-exile or postcolonial context. They are all important books and although the authors take different approaches, this seems like a significant moment in African literary history, a sort of lifting free from postcolonialist literary discourse into one of self-performance. To some degree, the general shape of this new engagement has been foreshadowed not just in earlier African fiction about being a refugee or immigrant in either North America or Europe, but also by the recent literature of the Indian diaspora, and several earlier generations of African-Caribbean writing. But the appearance of these books, quite close together, represents something important in the literature of the African continent. Mengestu seems to be aware of a sea change, referring here to a famous conference of African writers that took place at Makerere in 1962. Already the recipient of a number of awards in the United States, including a MacArthur fellowship, he is rapidly becoming a writer on the global stage. Giles Foden's novel Turbulence is published by Faber. To order All Our Names for pounds 14.39 with free UK p&p call Guardian book service on 0330 333 6846 or go to guardianbookshop.co.uk. - Giles Foden One of the narrators of All Our Names is a character a little like this. In fact this new novel by the Ethiopian-American writer Dinaw Mengestu, who won the Guardian first book award for Children of the Revolution, has two narrators. It is set in the 1970s, in Uganda and the American midwest. The narrator of the African sections is an Ethiopian who has travelled down to Uganda through Kenya, having shed the 13 ancestral names his father gave him. We know him briefly and intermittently only as Langston (after Langston Hughes) or the Professor, both names given to him by his militant friend Isaac. The pair hang about the fringes of the university in Kampala, then in the grip of revolutionary fervour. A born survivor, who saves his skin by appearing to extinguish his ego, "Langston" drifts along, trying to keep out of trouble. But eventually he gets drawn into military activity by Isaac, who becomes involved in a coup attempt and a series of brutal acts. - Giles Foden.
Kirkus Review
What's in a name? Identity of a kind, perhaps, but nothing like stability, and perhaps nothing like truth. So Mengestu (How to Read the Air, 2010, etc.) ponders in this elegiac, moving novel, his third. Himself an immigrant, Mengestu is alert to the nuances of what transplantation and exile can do to the spirit. Certainly so, too, is his protagonistor, better, one of two protagonists who just happen to share a name, for reasons that soon emerge. One narration is a sequence set in and around Uganda, perhaps in the late 1960s or early 1970s, in a post-independence Africa. (We can date it only by small clues: Rhodesia is still called that, for instance, and not Zimbabwe.) But, as in a V.S. Naipaul story, neither the country nor the time matter much in a tale about human universals, in this case the universal longing for justice and our seemingly universal inability to achieve it without becoming unjust ourselves. The narrator, riding into the place he calls "the capital," sheds his old identity straightaway: "I gave up all the names my parents had given me." Isaac, whom he meets on campus, is, like him, a would-be revolutionary, and in that career trajectory lies a sequence of tragedies, from ideological betrayals to acts of murder. The region splintering, their revolution disintegrating, Isaac follows the ever-shifting leader he reveres into the mouth of hell. Meanwhile, Isaacthe name now transferred, along with a passportflees to the snowy Midwest, where he assumes the identity of an exchange student, marked by a curious proclivity for Victorian English: "I remember thinking after that first afternoon that I felt like I was talking with someone out of an old English novel," says the caseworker, Helen, with whom he will fall in love. Neither Isaac can forget the crimes he has witnessed and committed, and the arc of justice that each seeks includes personal accountability. Redemption is another matter, but both continue the fight, whether in the scrub forest of Africa or at a greasy spoon somewhere along the Mississippi River. Weighted with sorrow and gravitas, another superb story by Mengestu, who is among the best novelists now at work in America.]] Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Library Journal Review
Here Mengestu (How To Read the Air) uses the story of an affair between Helen, an American social worker in the Midwest, and Isaac, an African immigrant posing as an exchange student, to examine questions of loyalty and community. Do not come to this novel expecting a "traditional" immigrant narrative. Mengestu uses the framework of geography and immigration to tell his sad and often harrowing tale of identity, responsibility, and love. Helen and Isaac relate their own parts of the story in alternating narratives read beautifully by Saskia Maarleveld and Korey Jackson. This structure lends grace notes to a moving, lyrical novel. VERDICT A wonderful listen. ["A highly recommended read that's as absorbing as it is thought-provoking; the ending is a real punch," read the starred review of the Knopf hc, LJ 3/15/14.]-Wendy Galgan, St. Francis Coll., Brooklyn (c) Copyright 2014. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
Excerpts
Excerpts
HELEN When I met Isaac, I was almost what my mother would have called "a woman of a certain age." That in her mind made me vulnerable, though I never felt that way, not even as a child growing up in a house where it would have been much easier to be a boy. My mother was a whisperer. She spoke in soft tones, in case my father was upset or had entered one of his dark moods, a habit which she continued after he had left. We lived in a quiet, semi- rural Midwestern town, and decorum for her was everything. What mattered most was that the cracks that came with a family were neatly covered up, so that no one knew when you were struggling to pay the mortgage, or that your marriage was over long before the divorce papers were signed. I think she expected that I would speak like her--and maybe when I was very small I did, but my instincts tell me that, more likely than not, this was never the case. I could never have been a whisperer. I liked my voice too much. I rarely read a book in silence. I wanted to hear every story out loud, so I often read alone in our backyard, which was large enough that if I yelled the story at the top of my voice, no one in the house closest to us could hear me. I read out there in the winter, when the tree branches sagged with ice and the few chickens we owned had to be brought into the basement so they wouldn't freeze to death. When I was older, and the grass was almost knee-high because no one bothered to tend to it anymore, I went back there with a book in my hand simply to scream. That Isaac said he didn't mind if I raised my voice was the first thing I liked about him. I had driven nearly three hours, across multiple county lines and one state line, to pick him up as a favor to my boss, David, who had explained to me earlier that morning that, although, yes, tending to foreigners, regardless of where they came from, wasn't a normal part of our jobs, he had made an exception for Isaac as a favor to an old friend, and now it was my turn to do the same. I was happy to take Isaac on. I had been a social worker for five years and was convinced I had already spent all the good will I had for my country's poor, tired, and dispossessed, whether they were black, white, old, fresh from prison, or just out of a shelter. Even the veterans, some of whom I had gone to high school with, left me at the end of a routine thirty-minute home visit desperate to leave, as if their anguish was contagious. I had lost too much of the heart and all the faith needed to stay afloat in a job where every human encounter felt like an anvil strung around my neck just when I thought I was nearing the shore. We were, on our business cards and letterhead, the Lutheran Relief Services, but there hadn't been any religious affiliation--not since the last Lutheran church for a hundred miles shut down at the start of World War II and all of its parishioners were rechristened as Methodists. It was common among the four of us in the office to say that not only were we not Lutheran, but we didn't really provide any services, either. We had always run on a shoestring budget, and that string was nipped an inch or two each year as our government grants dried up, leaving us with little more than a dwindling supply of good intentions and promises of better years to come. David said it first and most often: "We should change our name to 'Relief.' That way, when someone asks what you do, you can say, 'I work for Relief.' And if they ask you relief from what, just tell them, 'Does it really matter?' " Mildly bitter sarcasm was David's preferred brand of humor. He claimed it was a countermeasure to the earnestness that supposedly came with our jobs. I knew little about Isaac before I met him, except that he was from somewhere in Africa, that his English was most likely poor, and that the old friend of David's had arranged a student visa in order for him to come here because his life may or may not have been in danger. I wasn't supposed to be his social worker so much as his chaperone into Middle America--his personal tour guide of our town's shopping malls, grocery stores, banks, and bureaucracies. And Isaac was going to be, for at least one year, my guaranteed Relief. He was, in my original plans, my option out of at least some of our dire weekly budget meetings and the mini- mum of two hospital visits a month; last and most important, he secured my right to refuse to take on any new clients who were terminally ill. I had been to twenty-two funerals the year before, and though most were strangers to me when they passed, I felt certain my heart couldn't take much more. My first thought when I saw Isaac was that he was taller and looked healthier than I expected. From there, I worked my way backward to two assumptions I wasn't aware of possessing: the first that Africans were short, and the second that even the ones who flew all the way to a small college town in the middle of America would probably show signs of illness or malnutrition. My second thought--or third, depending on how you counted it--was that "he wasn't bad-looking." I said those same words to myself as a test to measure their sincerity. I felt my little Midwestern world tremble just a bit under the weight of them. Isaac and I had known each other for less than an hour when he told me he didn't mind if I sometimes shouted; I had already apologized for being late to meet him, and for failing to have a sign with his name on it when I arrived. Later, in the car, I apologized for driving too fast, and then, once we arrived in town, I apologized for my voice. "I'm sorry if I talk too loud," I said. It was the only apology I had repeatedly sworn over the past ten years never to make again. The frequency with which I broke that promise never softened the disappointment I felt immediately afterward. "You don't have to apologize for everything," he told me. "Talk as loud as you want. It's easier to understand you." I couldn't hug Isaac or thank him for his attempt at humor without making us feel awkward, but I wanted him to know that I wasn't normally so easily moved, that I was a woman of joy and laughter. I tried my best to give him an animated, lively description of our town. "It's pronounced 'Laurel,' like the flower," but I suspected that wasn't entirely correct, so I pointed to the hulking brick factory, which, other than a grain silo, was the tallest object on the horizon. "That used to be a bomb factory," I said. There were rumors that it would be converted into the state's largest shopping mall, but I wasn't sure he knew what a mall was, so I left that out. We drove past gas stations and fast-food restaurants clustered together every quarter-mile with nothing yet built in between them. I tried to think of something else interesting to say. I pointed to a gas station and said, "Fifteen years ago, that used to be a pig farm." A second later, I worried that maybe he didn't know what a pig farm was, or that maybe he thought I was bragging about our town's pig farms to someone who had just come from a country where there were no farms, or pigs. I had to bite my cheek to keep from apologizing. When we reached the old, charming main street that used to be the heart of the town, I asked him if there was anything he'd like to see before I took him to his apartment. "Thank you for asking," he said. "I would like to see the university if it isn't too much trouble." I looked at his hands. He had his hands palm-down on his thighs, with his back perfectly straight like a schoolboy trying to prove he was on his best behavior. I thought, Now I know what it means to be frightened stiff. We made a quick tour of the southern half of the campus. It wasn't the largest or most prestigious university in the state, but I always suspected it was the most beautiful. Like everyone, Isaac was impressed by the trees--hundred-year-old oaks that, especially in August, seemed more essential to the idea of the university than any of the buildings. I felt a surge of nostalgia every time I came there, and offered to take him to the library. "I would appreciate that," he said. We were standing in the main reading room--a wide, grand hall that a professor of mine had described as a terrible clash of Midwestern and classical taste--when I decided that, for Isaac's sake, I'd had enough of his formal politeness. He'd been staring silently for several minutes at the wood-paneled walls lined with leather books and supported by marble columns, all of which stood on top of a thick green carpet that could have been found in any one of a hundred living rooms in town. He looked down before he stepped onto the carpet, and I could almost hear him wondering if he should take his shoes off. He was still staring at the walls in awe when I shouted to him, "How do you like America?"--not quite at the top of my voice, but definitely somewhere near it. There were two weeks until the start of the semester, so the library was nearly empty. The few people there all turned to stare at us, and I could see a librarian on the other side of the hall slowly making her way toward me. As she did so, Isaac walked out of the room and then the library without saying a word. I began to prepare yet another series of apologies--to him, to the librarian, and, if I lost Isaac, to David. I waited until the librarian had almost reached me, before following Isaac out: to run after him, in our town, at that time, would have given the wrong impression. Isaac hadn't gone far. He was standing a few feet away from the front door, near the very top of the steps, with both hands tucked into his pockets, as if I had caught him in the middle of a late-afternoon stroll across campus. "I apologize for leaving so abruptly. I didn't understand what you were saying in there. Next time, please speak louder." I wanted to hug him again. There was a natural, easy charm to his words, and, more than that, forgiveness. No one else I had ever met spoke in such formal sentences. I had been told when given his file not to be offended if he didn't speak much, since his English was most likely basic, but I remember thinking that afternoon that I felt like I was talking with someone out of an old English novel. At the office the next day, when David asked what Isaac was like, I told him he was kind and had a nice smile and an interest- ing face, all of which was true and yet only a poor part of what I really wanted to say. David half listened to my description of Isaac. When I finished he asked me, "And what else, other than the obvious?" "He has a funny way of speaking," I said. "Funny how?" "He sounds old." "That's a new one. Maybe it's just his English." "No," I said, "his English is perfect. It's how I imagine someone talking in a Dickens novel." "Never read him," he said. And neither had I, but it was too late to admit that Dickens was merely my fall guy for all things old and English. From that day on, David and I took to calling Isaac "Dickens." When Isaac and I went to find more furniture for his nearly empty apartment, I told David, "I'm off now to see my old chum Dickens." In meetings, David would ask how Dickens was getting along in our quaint town, which only a decade earlier had stopped segregating its public bathrooms, buses, schools, and restaurants and still didn't look too kindly upon seeing its races mix. "He's doing very, very well," I said, in what was as close as I could come to an English accent. A month later, after Isaac and I had spent a half-dozen nights intertwined in his bed till just before midnight, I brought him a copy of A Tale of Two Cities. He had a growing stack of books, used and borrowed, around his bed, but none, I had noticed, were by Dickens. "A present," I said. It was unwrapped. I held the book out to him with both hands. He smiled and thanked me without looking at the cover. "Have you read it already?" I asked him. "No," he said. "But I have every intention of doing so right away." I laughed. I couldn't stop myself. He was so eager to please. I had to confess: "We have a nickname for you at the office. We call you Dickens." Only then did he look at the cover. "Dickens," he said. And again I was afraid I had embarrassed him. He flipped the book over and read the description on the back and, as he did so, smiled. It was the same expression he'd had on his face when I found him on the library steps. "I could do much worse here than that," he said. What Isaac and I never had was a proper start to our relationship. We missed out on the traditional rituals of courtship and awkward dinners that most couples use to measure the distance they've traveled from restaurant to bedroom. No one watched us draw closer, and no one was there to say that we made for a great or poorly matched couple. The first time Isaac placed his lips on mine was in his apartment after I had shown up unannounced to check on him. He had been in town for two weeks, and we already had a routine established. I picked him up from his apartment every other day at 4 p.m. In the beginning, our afternoons were spent primarily doing errands. I drove Isaac to the grocery store, bank, and post office. I spent an afternoon waiting with him for the telephone company to arrive, and when it came to furniture, I was the one who picked out the couch, coffee table, and dresser from the Goodwill store two towns away. Isaac told me he knew how to cook, but not in America. "The eggs here are different," he said. "They are white, and very big. And I don't understand the meat." And so I taught him what few domestic acts I had learned from my mother. I taught him how to choose the best steaks for his money from the grocery store. I held a package of discounted beef next to my face for contrast and said, "See those pockets of fat? That'll keep it from drying out," and told him that if he had any doubts he should smother it in butter. Eggs, I told him, were an entirely different matter. "I hate them. You'll have to find a better woman than me for that," I said. I knew that part of the reason I had been given this job was that David assumed that it would play to my motherly instincts, and that, as the only woman in the office without a family, I had the time. I never had those instincts, however. I watched friends from high school and college grow up, get married, and have children, and the most I had ever thought about that was "That could be nice." My mom had been that kind of mother, and if Isaac had been from Wyoming, I could have dropped him off at her house the day he arrived and never thought of him again until it was time for him to leave. "She would have made you fat," I told him. "And the only thing you probably would have ever heard out of her was a list of what was in the refrigerator and what time you could expect to eat." That kiss happened September 3, in the doorway between his living room and bedroom, just after we had returned to his apartment from buying silverware and plates. He was on his way to the bedroom and I was leaving the bathroom when we collided in the hallway, which was wide enough for only one person to pass at a time. Forced to stand face to face, what could we do but smile? "Do you live here as well?" Isaac asked me. "I do now," I said, and, without thinking, we leaned toward each other, me up and him down, until our lips met. We kissed long enough to be certain it wasn't an accident. When we opened our eyes and separated, what we felt wasn't surprise so much as relief that our first moment of intimacy felt so ordinary--almost habitual, as if it had been part of our routine for years to kiss while passing. I was late getting back to my office, but had I not been, I would still have wanted to leave on a dramatic note. I grabbed my jacket and thought of walking forcefully out the door, stopping for one final, brief kiss, but once I was close to him, I wanted to press my nose into the crook of Isaac's neck so I could smell him, and that was exactly what he let me do. "You are like a cat," he said. "You smell like onions," I told him. He craned his neck around mine. We held that pose for at least a minute, at which point I pulled away so I wouldn't have to worry about him doing so. When I was back in his apartment two days later, I walked from room to room as soon as I entered. Isaac asked me what I was doing. I took his hand and pinched the flesh between his thumb and index finger before wrapping my arms around him. "I'm making sure you're really here," I said. He lifted my chin up to his lips and kissed me quickly. "Does that help?" he asked. It did, but it wasn't enough. Compared with others, Isaac was made of almost nothing, not a ghost but a sketch of a man I was trying hard to fill in. I nudged him backward until we landed on the couch. I felt his legs trembling; I was relieved to know he was nervous. "I'm still not convinced," I said. My doubt became the cover story we needed to take each other apart. Isaac kissed my neck, and in return, I took off his shirt and placed his hands on the bottom of my blouse so he knew he should do the same. I kissed his chest and he kissed mine. Once we were undressed, he asked, "And what about now?" I raised my hips and pulled him inside me. "I'm almost convinced," I said. His right leg never stopped trembling. Knowing he was afraid made me want to hold on to him that much harder, and I thought if I did so, with time I could help color in the missing parts. With no outside world to ground us, every moment of intimacy that passed between Isaac and me did so in an isolated reality that began and ended on the other side of his apartment door. I had never had a relationship with a man like that, but I under- stood how easily the tiny world Isaac and I were slowly building could vanish. "I am dependent on you for everything," he often said during our first two months together. He said it sometimes as a joke, sometimes out of anger. He could say it if I had just told him where his glasses were, or if I had taken his clothes out of the washing machine and hung them to dry because I knew he had a habit of leaving them in the washer overnight, and it would be affectionate and charming and made me think that it wouldn't be so bad to fall in love with a man like this, who noticed the small things you did for him and found a way to say thank you without making you feel like his mother. At other times, he said the same words and all I heard was how much he hated saying them, and how much he might have hated me, at least in those moments, as well. The list of things he was dependent upon me for grew larger the longer he stayed in our town. In the beginning he needed me only to do my job: to help get him from one point to another, since he had no car or license; to explain basic things, like when and when not to dial 911. Later on, he needed me to sit with him quietly in the dark and hold his hand as he mourned the loss of someone he loved. Once, he called me at work and asked me to leave the phone on the desk, just so he could hear other people talking. He didn't always know how to fill his days. He had his books--dense historical works and biographies along with a smaller collection of romance novels that he kept hidden under his bed. He read obsessively. When I asked him why, he said it was "to make up for all the lost time," because he had never had access to libraries like ours until now; but I suspected it had as much to do with not knowing what to do with all those long empty hours. Isaac had none of the good or the bad that came with living in such close, sustained contact with your past. If there was any- thing I pitied him for, it was the special loneliness that came with having nothing that was truly yours. Being occasionally called "boy" or "nigger," as he was, didn't compare to having no one who knew him before he had come here, who could remind him, simply by being there, that he was someone else entirely. Excerpted from All Our Names by Dinaw Mengestu All rights reserved by the original copyright owners. Excerpts are provided for display purposes only and may not be reproduced, reprinted or distributed without the written permission of the publisher.
