The son of Ethiopian immigrants seeks to understand a hidden family history and uncovers a past colored by unexpected loss, addiction, and the enduring emotional pull toward home.
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.
