As a driver of plot, personal and emotional slipperiness is a trickier endeavor than old-fashioned secrecy; we can’t rely on the well-timed reveal, the moment when all is made clear, nor enjoy knowing more than the characters while waiting for them to catch up. To appreciate Mengestu’s work, you have to be ready to live in uncertainty, to find any truths obliquely, if at all. If you can accomplish that, the journey is well worth the discomfort ... That’s the narrative trick of this entire novel, in fact; you’re going to catch the real only out of the corner of your eye. Don’t bother trying to look at things directly because all you’ll see are the cover stories and lies ... Those of us who love skewed narratives, slanted truths, destabilized fictions love them best not when they’re just tricks to yank the reader along, but when they speak to the instabilities of reality itself, or of a particular life. Mamush might be hapless, but this book is not; it’s meticulously constructed and its genius doesn’t falter even slightly under scrutiny. Its unreliability is earned, and central ... This might not be the novel that earns him broad popular acclaim...but it’s the book that ought to cement Mengestu’s reputation as a major literary force.
Strikingly ruminative ... Be patient, and you’ll eventually settle into this book’s strange motion. The structure of the novel feels like a Möbius strip cut from sheets of grief.
I love the way Mengestu writes ... I also sometimes feel frustrated with how Mengestu writes: specifically, with how this novel keeps reminding readers of the near-impossibility of breaking out of the same old mold when it comes to telling immigrant stories. Ironically, Mengestu’s own ingenuity and eloquence as a writer show at least one way to do so ... Mengestu has written a most idiosyncratic American immigrant novel, a genre that’s been available to generations and to recent arrivals from every point on the globe. All the resonant tropes are here — the crowded apartments and the random acts of nativist violence — but, by altering the reader’s vantage points, Mengestu ultimately turns the story back onto us and the control we think we have over the story of our own lives.
The kind of anti-characterization that Mengestu plays with here is risky. Rather than merely feeling disassociated, Mamush courts featurelessness...Rather than become a tragic, mysterious father figure, Samuel could end up just a bundle of confusions that resist interpretation — Schrodinger’s dad. But Mengestu’s solution is a sharp one: He makes the urge to craft a coherent story something of a character in itself, revealing how desperate we are to contrive narratives from scattered parts. In the closing chapters, Mengestu concocts a kind of fantasia out of this instinct, building an imagined story about Samuel from the available evidence, shaped by Mamush’s own uncertain yearnings ... in Mengestu’s hands, plotlessness and incomprehension never seemed so essential to getting the story right.
... this structurally fragmented and sometimes dizzyingly esoteric novel reads more like Mengestu’s heady, theoretical trip into the African diaspora ... And maybe that’s Mengestu’s point. Maybe that’s his grand experiment — to write a novel that shows more than tells just how meaningful but truly disparate and often opaque any one immigrant’s story can be.
[A] wise and genial novel ... It's evidence of his dexterous narrative technique — tipping in secrets and secrets-within-secrets — that propels his tale toward a satisfying, if ambivalent, conclusion ... There are flashbacks tucked among flashbacks, slowing momentum just when the author should accelerate. And Mengestu's prose, while solid, never sings ... But these are quibbles: the novel's architecture enthralls, drawing us intothe opaque naves and transepts of an addict's shame and an immigrant's tenacious hope. Where some see crowded rooms, Mengestu sees cathedrals. Someone Like Us keeps opening and opening its emotional spaces, long after Samuel is silent.
Stunning ... Pushes far beyond "immigrant novel" status or any similar, confining labels, meditating expansively on questions of displacement, family love, and the battle between denial and self-reckoning.
[A] subtle, brilliant new novel about family secrets ... Aside from being a wonderful read, it’s a tribute to the majesty of storytelling and its ability to help one make sense of the world. A decade has passed since Mengestu’s last novel, the equally exceptional All Our Names. Someone Like Us is the welcome return of a vitally important voice in modern American literature.
Mengestu blurs historical details in favor of crisply remembered experience—dwellings in the Washington, DC, suburbs and the textures of 20-year-old taxi cabs. Here, too, he defies standard immigrant-narrative tropes in which successes compensate for feelings of longing, displacement, and loss. But this time, it’s bleaker as Mengestu emphasizes his characters’ fears of deportation, of being pulled over by police, and their utter exhaustion as work and anxiety rob them of sleep. A moving, memorable novel.
Mengestu shifts fluidly between fabulism and realism, and the narrative is full of wisdom related to Samuel’s disillusionment with the American dream. Mengestu’s tremendous talents are on full display.
