How to Read the Air

Starred review from August 2, 2010
Mengestu (The Beautiful Things That Heaven Bears) stunningly illuminates the immigrant experience across two generations. Jonas Woldemariam's parents, near strangers when they marry in violence-torn Ethiopia, spend most of the early years of their marriage separated, eventually reuniting in America, but their ensuing life together devolves into a mutual hatred that forces a contentious divorce. Three decades later, Jonas, himself moving toward a divorce, retraces his parents' fateful honeymoon road trip from Peoria, Ill., to Nashville in an attempt to understand an upbringing that turned him into a man who has "gone numb as a tactical strategy" and become a fluent and inveterate liar—a skill that comes in handy at his job at an immigration agency, where he embellishes African immigrants' stories so that they might be granted asylum. Mengestu draws a haunting psychological portrait of recent immigrants to America, insecure and alienated, striving to fit in while mourning the loss of their cultural heritage and social status. Mengestu's precise and nuanced prose evokes characters, scenes, and emotions with an invigorating and unparalleled clarity.

Starred review from November 1, 2010

A sometimes somber, always searching novel of love, loss and the immigrant experience by Ethiopia-born writer Mengestu (The Beautiful Things that Heaven Bears, 2006).

Mariam and Yosef are miserable, and for several reasons, not least the fact that husband and wife do not really know each other. Torn from their homeland by civil war, they have been plopped down on the flats of Illinois, settled in the white-bread city of Peoria and left to fend for themselves. Yosef, though, has ambition, and in time he puts himself behind the wheel of a weathered Monte Carlo—"a shabbier shade of red than the one she imagined"—and points its nose toward a destination, Nashville, since he loves nothing more than country music. It is not the honeymoon that Mariam, separated from Yosef for years, has dreamed of, and indeed, though the distance from Peoria to Nashville is less than 500 miles, it turns into something quite spectacularly ugly. Years later, their son, Jonas Woldemariam, is grappling with reality and identity. Smart and literate, he's living in New York City, teaching English at a fancy prep school while provoking wonder that he's so well-spoken and up on things American. Of course, he is American, thanks to a life in Peoria; when Jonas tells an interviewer of that fact, Mengestu writes, with gentle but pointed humor, "I could see him wondering if it was possible that there was more than one Peoria in this world, another situated perhaps thousands of miles away from the one he had heard of in the Midwest and therefore completely off his radar." As if by way of proof, Jonas has a suitable roster of American neuroses and problems, including a marriage that seems to be disintegrating with each day. And what better to speed that collapse than to try to re-create his parents' fateful journey, tragedy and all?

Elegant, confident prose brings this tale to life, and though the trope of the road as a journey to self-understanding is a very old one, Mengestu gives it a fresh reading.

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Starred review from June 1, 2010
The characters in Mengestu's triumphant second novel (after the award-winning "The Beautiful Things That Heaven Bears") are forever having what one of them calls a "leaving experience." Ethiopian immigrant Yosef passed many borders before arriving in America; wife Miriam continually walks away from her abusive husband (even leaving their wrecked car in a ditch) before finally achieving permanent escape; and their diffident son, Jonas, the story's narrator, leaves dreams unfulfilled and eventually leaves his marriagethough, says his wife, he was never really there in the first place. The well-constructed narrative parallels Jonas's story and that of his parents, deftly cutting from the slow fizzle of Jonas's marriage to his parents' troubled lives to their iconic car trip from Peoria to Nashville before he was born. After his marriage ends, Jonas reconstructs that tripa device that frames the novel, though it's really the emotional journey that matters. VERDICT In authoritative prose that flows like liquid gold, Mengestu tells an absorbing story of how we learn that simply going forward is in fact to triumph. Highly recommended. [See Prepub Alert, "LJ" 5/1/10.]Barbara Hoffert, "Library Journal"

Copyright 2010 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

October 15, 2010
All of his life, Jonas Woldemariam had been listening for tension in the air, not so much to take action but simply to be aware. In his mid-thirties, with his marriage failing, he quietly drifts away from his life emotionally. Not that hed ever been deeply engaged, or at least he hasnt appeared to be, according to his wife, Angela, an ambitious attorney with a New York law firm, desperately seeking the stability she didnt have growing up. Jonas had known childhood instability as well, the child of Ethiopian immigrants whod separated early in their marriage and reunited later when his father, Yosef, finally immigrated to America, specifically Peoria, Illinois. But their time apart had established a distance the couple could never close, leaving Jonas to witness domestic violence and crushing indifference. Jonas narration alternates between the dissolution of his own marriage and observations of a trip back to the Midwest to imagine the dissolution of his parents marriage. Mengestu, author of The Beautiful Things That Heaven Bears (2007), offers a similarly languid yet emotionally charged unwinding of relationships amid the turmoil of immigration and cultural adjustment.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2010, American Library Association.)