MixedThe New York Times Book ReviewMengestu’s...How to Read the Air, is deeply thought out, deliberate in its craftsmanship and in many parts beautifully written ... Admittedly, How to Read the Air feels weaker than The Beautiful Things That Heaven Bears. Mengestu’s first novel was a pithy portrayal of immensely different worlds colliding. His second is like a baggy reprise. Jonas’s interiority both illuminates and fatigues; variations on his emotional injuries are rendered too often, becoming clichés of Mengestu’s careful initial depictions. At times Mengestu doesn’t seem to trust his reader to get his point, while the momentum of poetic prose, of a well-turned phrase or astute observation, often continues two clicks too long, detracting from the narrative’s velocity ... In the end, however, Mengestu distinguishes this book by adeptly using Yosef’s story to deepen the narrative, and by creating Jonas’s redemption through the character’s act of story-retelling ... In How to Read the Air, he has forged something meaningful from his cultural perspective. The book lingers in the mind as personal—not in the characters’ specifics, but in their frustrated dislocation in the world.
Teju Cole
RaveThe New York TimesThe very first words in Open City, an indelible debut novel by Teju Cole, imply an inevitability, connecting the narrator’s past with his present task, that of explaining his place in the world... With every anecdote, with each overlap, Cole lucidly builds a compassionate and masterly work engaged more with questions than with answers regarding some of the biggest issues of our time: migration, moral accountability and our tenuous tolerance of one another’s differences ... Cole’s writing is assured, his ideas are well developed, and his imagery is delicious...his talent for juxtaposing the past and the present turns this book into a symphonic experience... His readers will be those who understand that all stories are interconnected, that literature is not mere entertainment, and that art is nothing if not an extended conversation spanning eras, nations and languages.
