All Our Names

Starred review from November 18, 2013
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 narratorsâone speaking from the past in Africa, one in present-day Americaâhas 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 âthe Capital.â 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 sideâs 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 charactersâIsaac, the saddened visionary; Isaac, the secretive refugee; Helen, the sympathetic loverâwho are all caught in a cycle of connection and disruption, engagement and abandonment, hope and disillusion. Agent: P.J. Mark, Janklow & Nesbit Associates.

Starred review from February 1, 2014
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 protagonist--or, 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, Isaac--the name now transferred, along with a passport--flees 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(2014) Kirkus Reviews, ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.

February 15, 2014
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.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2014, American Library Association.)

Starred review from March 15, 2014

"I came for the writers and stayed for the war," says one of the narrators in this latest book from Mengestu (How To Read the Air), which in its focused and lean, beautiful writing is his best book yet. Mengestu blends this narrator's story of an African homeland rent by warfare he helped foment with that of Helen, the social worker with whom he becomes involved after escaping to America. Through his characters, the author examines Africa's plight (paralleled by continuing racism in America), the risks of revolution, the lure of power, and, especially, the enduring strength of love. Our young man in Africa has arrived in the city from the hinterlands, eager for an education. He learns something very different from what he expected when he meets the charismatic Isaac, who stirs an uprising at the university (where he isn't even registered) and finally pulls his new friend into a rebellion that turns shockingly bloody, sometimes hurting those it would help. Woven into the story of this essential friendship is the socially reticent Helen's fierce and touching involvement with the client she knows as Isaac. VERDICT A highly recommended read that's as absorbing as it is thought-provoking; the ending is a real punch. [See Prepub Alert, 9/9/13.]--Barbara Hoffert, Library Journal

Copyright 2014 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

October 1, 2013

Winner of the National Book Foundation's 5 Under 35 Award, The New Yorker's 20 Under 40 Award, and a 2012 MacArthur Foundation Fellowship, Mengestu opened his career with the bittersweetly tantalizing The Beautiful Things That Heaven Bears, then truly proved himself with How To Read the Air. Here's his next work, set in an African country racked by revolution. The hero abandons his university studies to join the uprising in the streets, then finds idealism fading into heedless violence and flees to America, where he's haunted by memories of what he has done. He also recalls the revolutionary leader who brought him to the streets and thereafter assured his safe passage from the country through personal sacrifice. With an eight-city tour.

Copyright 2013 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

Starred review from July 1, 2014
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

Copyright 2014 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.