Vroege RecensentenDinaw Mengestu

An author of rare and shining talent, Dinaw Mengestu has received a MacArthur Foundation genius grant and New Yorker’s 20 Under 40 Award. All Our Names follows a young African revolutionary who takes the guise of an exchange student and begins a new life in America—only to discover the inexorable shredding of his present by the demons of his past. Fiction “Mengestu portrays the intersection of cultures … with unsettling perception.”—Publishers Weekly, starred review 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.

Dinaw Mengestu’s first novel The Beautiful Things That Heaven Bears earned the young writer comparisons to Bellow, Fitzgerald, and Naipaul and garnered ecstatic critical praise and awards around the world for its haunting depiction of the immigrant experience in America. Now, he enriches the themes that defined his debut in a story that captures two generations of an immigrant family. One early September afternoon, Yosef and Mariam, young Ethiopian immigrants who have spent all but their first year of marriage apart, set off on a road trip from their new home in Peoria, Illinois to Nashville, Tennessee, in search of their new identity as an American couple. Just months later, their son Jonas is born in Illinois. Thirty years later, Yosef has died, and Jonas is desperate to make sense of the volatile generational and cultural ties that have forged him. How can he envision his future without knowing what has come before? Leaving behind his marriage and job in New York, Jonas sets out to retrace his parents’ trip and in a stunning display of imagination, weaves together a family history that takes him from the war-torn Ethiopia of his parents’ youth to a brighter vision of his life in the America of today, a story—real or invented—that holds the possibility of reconciliation and redemption. A heartbreaking literary masterwork about love, family, and the power of imagination, How to Read the Air confirms Dinaw Mengestu's reputation as one of the brightest talents of his generation.