DINAW MENGESTU / How to Read the Air

Oct 16 2010 7:30 pm

 

O Magazine Review

 

 

 

Dinaw Mengestu's first novel, TheBeautiful Things That Heaven Bears, earned the young writer comparisons toBellow, Fitzgerald, and Naipaul, and garnered ecstatic critical praise andawards around the world for its haunting depiction of the immigrant experience.In How to Read the Air,Mengestu enriches the themes that defined his debut with a heartbreaking literarymasterwork about love, family, and the power of imagination, which confirms hisreputation as one of the brightest talents of his generation.

One early September afternoon, Yosef and Mariam, youngEthiopian 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 a new identity as an American couple. Soon, their son,Jonas, will be born in Illinois.Thirty years later, Yosef has died, and Jonas needs to make sense of thevolatile generational and cultural ties that have forged him. How can heenvision his future without knowing what has come before? Leaving behind hismarriage and job in New York, Jonas sets outto retrace his mother and father's trip and weave together a family historythat will take him from the war-torn Ethiopiaof his parents' youth to his life in the America of today, a story -- realor invented -- that holds the possibility of reconciliation and redemption.

 

Dinaw Mengestu was born in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia, in 1978. In 1980, heimmigrated to the United Stateswith his mother and sister, joining his father, who had fled Ethiopia duringthe Red Terror. He is a graduate of Georgetown University and ColumbiaUniversity’s MFA program in fiction and the recipient of a 2006 fellowship infiction from the New York Foundation for the Arts and a 5 Under 35 Award fromthe National Book Foundation in 2007. Mengestu has written for Rolling Stone and Harper’s, among other publications; he lives in New York City. The New Yorker’s Summer Fiction double issue, this summer, heralds 20fiction writers under 40 who “capture the inventiveness and the vitality ofcontemporary American fiction.” Dinaw Mengestu is one of them.

 

 

How to Read the Air (Hardcover)

By Dinaw Mengestu
$25.95
ISBN-13: 9781594487705
Availability: Usually Ships in 1-5 days
Published: Riverhead Hardcover, 10/2010
Other Editions of this Title

The Beautiful Things That Heaven Bears (Paperback)

By Dinaw Mengestu
$15.00
ISBN-13: 9781594482854
Availability: On Our Shelves Now
Published: Riverhead Trade, 2/2008
Other Editions of this Title
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