Someone Like Us: A novel

Rating: 4.5* of five

The Publisher Says: After abandoning his once promising career as a journalist in search of a new life in Paris, Mamush meets Helen-a photographer whose way of seeing the world shows him the possibility of finding not only love, but family. Now, five years later, with his marriage to Helen on the verge of collapse, he returns to the close-knit immigrant Ethiopian community of Washington DC that defined his childhood. At its center is Mamush's stoic, implacable mother, and Samuel,the larger-than-life father-figure whose ceaseless charm and humor have always served as cover for a harder, more troubling truth. But on the same day that Mamush arrives home in Washington, Samuel is found dead in his garage.

With Helen and show more their two-year old son back in Paris, Mamush sets out on an unexpected journey across America in search of answers to questions he'd been told never to ask. As he does so, he begins to understand that perhaps the only chance he has of saving his family and making it back home is to confront not only the unresolved mystery around Samuel's life and death, but his own troubled memories, and the years spent masking them. Breath-taking, commanding, unforgettable work from one of America's most prodigiously gifted novelists.

I RECEIVED A DRC FROM THE PUBLISHER VIA NETGALLEY. THANK YOU.

My Review: I am a very, very white old man. I experience none of what Mamush does, or expects to, on a daily personal basis. My Young Gentleman Caller is half-black (he prefers lowercase to uppercase "Black"). There are times I am utterly oblivious to what that idiotic blood quantum theory of human identity means because I get none of it. What I *do* get is profiled, when traveling, as an American...some indefinable something about me is ineradicable, and inescapably American. Among anti-semites I am always assumed to be a Jew. (Among Jews as well, which can get awkward.) As a gay man, and an old one, I'm often seen as not queer enough, or just a bit too queer. Can't win for losin'.

So when I read Author Mengestu's books, I am not just pruriently peeping in on his characters' struggles with identity and its ramifications.

The great strength of Author Mengestu is his lovely language. One of my all-time favorite aperçus of his is from How to Read the Air: "There is nothing so easily remade as our definitions of ourselves." (Note to self: Why haven't we reviewed that one?) This book, too, is full of meaty thoughts on identity, on the mutability of selfhood, on the complexity of being alive in an interwoven web of love and fear and distrust, trying to spin new threads as old ones fray, of making the effort to stick yourself to the ones you thought you wanted to escape. The way webs form...from the center outward, directed by a design and made for a purpose...is, however, the opposite of that other great center-driven natural structure: the hurricane. These form when a depression becomes so empty that everything around it is drawn in to fill its vacant space in the atmosphere. Mamush, with the best of intentions, is a hurricane. “You’re like a donut. There’s a hole in the middle, where something solid should be,” says his wife.

He sticks to nothing, nothing sticks to him. His deep and abiding depression formed in his deeply uprooted "family." His mother and father escaped imploding Ethiopia, and in a truly terrible series of bad decisions, engendered their child Mamush. Neither, though they are friends, wants to raise a child with the other. Mamush has the ordinary single-mother experience of childhood with all its spaces and silences and absences. His father would've been absent no matter what because he is a man on a mission to help other Ethiopian immigrants starting a taxi business to employ them in the US. Tgat makes him professionally unrooted, always in motion, at the mercy of those around him, subject to their moods and attitudes in service of making a living. Mamush is his father's son. He abandons a job as a journalist...someone who observes from the sidelines...to run away from the ever-darkening US. It's the way these men live. He starts a family in France, which honestly sounds like one of the worst ideas anyone ever had. That, unsurprisingly, just presses his depression even lower down: his son is disabled, a hard, hard road for the best prepared parent. Predictably, it's a terrible stressor for Mamush. At his mother's summons to come home to DC and help her figure out where his father has got to, he's outta there leaving son and wife to struggle along without him.

It's deeply telling that he misses his plane. It's even more telling that he, on a whim with no forethought, then switches his ticket from DC to Chicago. It wasn't just a whim, really, as his parents had lived with him in Chicago before settling in DC. His unmooring from his plans, from his family, from his career, is all in service of a Quest. Who doesn't love a Quest? He's so turbulent, such a low-pressure spot in his own life, that he's attracting chaos at such a huge rate he must find a way to fill himself from the center outward or succumb to that destructive chaos.

A man in search of a center, a man whose essence is unquiet and kinetic, who now wants something he's never had and has no tools in his kit to create, is a danger to himself and others until he finds the thing that can act as solid ground. Standing still is only possible when there's solid ground under you. Then the hole formed so early in life, made from the same stuff as the edges are, is the small nugget of solidity he can stand on. From this small, awkwardly shaped piece, a center is formed, and the spinning of that web of intent, design, and adhesion can begin.

This is when Mamush says to his father: “There isn’t one story. Things start and end abruptly. Some pages are just a single paragraph. I don’t always understand who’s speaking or what’s happening. If what you’ve written is fact or fiction.”

Homecoming, homegoing, home is now within reach. It is a beautiful moment in a book that, for almost half its length, made me want to slap the hell out of Mamush, out of his parents, and maybe most of all his idiot wife who had a child with this deeply unready man. All comes out well, or at least "well" is finally in sight, for Mamush. Guaranteed? No. Delivered? Not really. But visible at last.

I think Dinaw Mengestu deserves a stonking medal for taking me on this journey that irked and annoyed me, but lured me on with his usual glorious phrasemaking music, then delivered me to an ending I could both believe completely and feel satisfied with. Kudos to you, sir. show less

"Yes. Let's say he returns home to Ethiopia. It's been forty years since he was last in the country. What do you thing happens to him next?"

"I don't know."

"Let me tell you. When he gets off the plane, he realizes he has no idea where he is. He's afraid to leave the airport. When he left, Addis was like a village....He's at home nowhere in the world. It's better not to know that. It's better to imagine that someday you will return home and that when you do, everything will be better than it was when you left."

Mamush returns to the US to see his mother, but he gets lost on the way. He's been living in Paris with his wife and son, but somehow he's always had one foot out the door and his once promising journalism career has faded. He show more returns to see his mother's friend, Samuel, a man he realizes is his father, a cab driver living in the DC suburbs and part of the Ethiopian community there. As he travels toward, or fails to travel toward, his father's funeral, he returns to the places in Chicago that marked him, and searches for the man he never really knew.

This is a bittersweet story that moves through time in a non-linear way, with Mamush's memories frequently taking him from the present moment. It should be confusing, but Dinaw Mengestu controls the narrative in such an assured way, that each digression makes sense and serves to build the story he is telling. As Mamush and Samuel navigate their lives, there is the constant presence of the absent country, a country they can't return to, or in Mamush's case, have never seen, but which is ever present, often more than the country in which they have lived most of their lives. And as Mamush looks at his father's life, he is also looking at his own, and in doing so may find what he needs to move forward. show less

I started to say... What a puzzle! But someone else called it an Escher print. And I would say: many Escher prints. Probably requires more time to think this over! Probably requires another read through to understand it better. Things so subtle you might miss them. I have lots of questions. But I think much of this is designed to be vague, open ended. Mengestu does not want to pigeonhole his characters or give easy answers. I appreciate subtlety, especially with some themes. A story of immigration, belonging, family, addiction, grief, escaping war and trauma, how to understand the people closest to us. At times things were confusing, despite having a simplistic style on a sentence construction level. The narrative and characters seem to show more twist around itself, so I think this sort of sentence choice was a necessary gift. Sometimes weird dreamlike or bardolike narrative choices. Not sure if I understood it! Intentionally meant to be open to interpretation. I think in lesser hands, this book could have been a disaster. I would set this on the shelf next to 'We Do Not Part' by Han Kang and 'Percival Everett by Virgil Russell' by Percival Everett.
*Book #163/358 I have read of the shortlisted Morning News Tournament of Books show less

I used to think, Look at me. Now that I am in America everything is possible. Someone Like Us by Dinaw Mengestu

The the people who gave birth to us are the greatest mysteries. Their past, their hearts, are secrets.

The only mystery that is greater is ourselves. Perhaps if we could understand our parents we can understand our own hearts.

Mamush and his wife Hannah and their son live in Paris. Mamush wants his family to meet his mother, who was born in Ethiopia, and now lives in Virginia. But their son’s diagnoses with a rare disorder prompts Hannah to stay home with their son. Knowing his marriage was on rocky grounds, Mamush leaves them behind to return home. His wife wonders if he will return. But Mamush purposefully misses his flight show more and then changes his destination to Chicago, where he grew up.

That night, the man he called Uncle, who was likely his father, kills himself. And so Mamush’s trip to America becomes a search to understand Samuel–who he was, his history, and why he ended his life. And doing so, Mamush must face his own life.

Samuel had a checkered life. Born in Ethiopia, he had believed that America would bring him success. Instead, he worked as a cab driver all of his life. He struggled with addiction, was living with Mamush and his mother in Washington D.C. when he was arrested. When his mother went to visit Samuel, she left Mamush in a grocery store with Stephanos, another Ethiopian who never found the American Dream.

As a journalist, Mamush wrote about tragedies across the world. Samuel had told him to write happy stories, love stories. And to tell the ‘whys’. What if I don’t know why, Mamush responds; then Make it up, Samuel replies.

Over several days, Mamush revisits his life and memories of Samuel in a search to understand why he killed himself. He discovers secrets that only rise to more questions.

The narrative skips from memory to present to the imagined. But everything that happens to Mamush has one purpose: to return him to his family in Paris and make his marriage work.

Thanks to the publisher for a free book. show less

Hard book to describe. If you like linear stories, this is probably not the book for you. That said, the writing is gorgeous and the reader can become immersed in Mamush's journey both physical and emotional. The characters, especially Samuel and Mamush are captivating and their complex relationships make the book.

Mamush, a journalist, and his wife, Hannah (not Helen), a photographer, live in Paris with their young son, who has a neurological condition. He was reared in an Ethiopian community near Washington DC after his mother and Samuel (who may or may not be his biological father) migrated from Ethiopia. Mamush’s marriage is troubled, and he has always had questions about his heritage. The story begins with Mamush changing his travel plans and lying to his wife about it.

Mamush attempts to figure out why Samuel has died by an apparent suicide. He is also on a journey of self-discovery. The timeline moves backward and forward among real events, imaginings, and memories. It is obvious that Mamush often has difficulty telling the truth and is show more likely experiencing mental troubles. This is a character-driven novel and not for anyone looking for a dynamic plot. It is nicely written literary fiction that kept my attention from start to finish. I think the author does an excellent job with the ending, which I found very satisfying. show less

While this was well written, it just meandered for me. It is the story of Mamush, the American son of an Ethiopian immigrant. It begins with Samuel's death, the man who was a father figure to him. Mamush was a journalist, married to Hannah, living in Paris with her and their 2 year old son. However, their marriage is on the rocks, and Mamush is searching for answers. He travels across America in his search, and Samuel, while alive, tries to give Mamush some life lessons.
It is the story of a man searching for meaning in his heritage, his life, his love.