How to Read the Air

How to Read the Air is the latest book from Dinaw Mengestu, and it's one that manages to explore the subtle differences between what we believe and what may be true.

Briefly, it is the story of a man named Jonas, who attempts to reconstruct his parents first years in the US when they emigrated from Ethiopia. Their marriage was fractured and strange, and in the wake of his own disastrous marriage, he hopes to find answers to his personal identity by going back to his parent’s lives. He believes that by better understanding them, he can make sense of his own awkwardness. He describes his youth:

“I had always suspected that at some early point in my life, while still living with my parents and their daily battles, I had gone numb as a show more tactical strategy, perhaps at exactly that moment when we’re supposed to be waking up to the world and stepping into our own.”

However, rather than being a straightforward story of nostalgia, Mengestu deepens the narrative by showing, immediately, that Jonas is not exactly truthful. He works for an agency that helps new immigrants acquire legal citizenship in the US, and he’s known for his smudging the lines of truth to create more sympathetic experiences for his clients. In other words, he lies, boldly yet with the awareness of remaining credible. Thus, we learn our narrator is unreliable. How much truth will be revealed as he relates the story of his parents and his own marriage? This creates suspense and makes understanding the characters that much more complicated. A reader is forced to examine each statement and weigh it for accuracy, and consider what Jonas may be trying to hide.

First, we learn of his parents. They emigrated separately, his father first with his mother coming a year later. They are two incredibly different personality types: his father is perceptive and quiet, with a gift for noticing his surroundings and an almost sixth-sense for staying out of trouble. His focus on intangible concepts makes him reserved and wise. His mother, on the other hand, is obsessed with the tangible: possessions made her feel safe and contented in Ethiopia, where her status was high. Now in the US, her position in the world has changed, and as a minority with less wealth than she’s used to, she is insecure and angry.

Jonas himself married Angela, another lost soul who finds security in squirreling money away, while occasionally succumbing to a pair of Jimmy Choos for their therapeutic benefit. Angela is the most fascinating character to me, and in one of her conversations, she also reveals what she thinks of ‘telling the truth’:

“There’s no such thing as kind of true. If I told you the whole story, you could say it’s true, but you don’t know the story. […] Everyone thinks they know the whole story because they saw something like it on television or read about it in a magazine. To them it’s all just one story told over and over. Change the dates and the names but it’s the same. Well, that’s not true. It’s not the same story.”

Angela is beyond needy, and her outlet for her insecurities is to control others as much as possible. She pushes Jonas to change every chance she gets. Despite her success as an attorney, her deep unhappiness is revealed in snarky remarks and a mistrust of everyone. Jonas and Angela are doomed by their inability to know truth. Significantly, Angela is portrayed much like his mother-focused on concrete items she can see and own, while Jonas is more cerebral and aloof. Does he realize how he has replicated his parent's dynamics?

Plot aside, the prevarication that Jonas is prone to makes reading this that much more interesting. It’s difficult to know what facts to accept or disregard, and he gives himself away at times. For example, at one point he describes his mother playing mind games with his father by making him wait endlessly in the car as they leave for their honeymoon. At one point she pretends to forget something and runs back into the house-she’s having a meltdown. Yet, her meltdown is counted in seconds (her little trick for calming herself), and so she allows herself a little more than 200 seconds to calm herself. Then she returns to the car. A stressed out woman with a meltdown that lasts less than four minutes? Seriously, how is that possibly a bad thing? Or is it that Jonas is letting us know that she isn’t actually as moody as he’s portrayed her? Could he be admitting that she's just as fearful as Angela, the woman he left? That would mean his version of both of these women, as controlling and difficult, may not be accurate. Is Jonas up for the challenge of truly understanding his own story?

As a reader, I enjoyed this overall but a few things bothered me. For one, while delving deep into some explanations, he skims over other details that would have bearing: he never explains why, aside from a shared race, that he and Angela married. And, when he takes a job teaching, why the sudden epiphany about his suddenly fitting into the world? What changed? He had worked before in the public sector-what was it about this new job that flipped his identity over? Lastly, a few sentences were structurally ambiguous, and I had to catch myself and reread them a few times to figure out who he was talking about. A minor thing, but it was enough to trip the pace a bit. show less

Beautifully crafted story with rich language - almost poetic at times, I was highlighting every other page. The stories of two generations are told here - Mariam and Yosef Woldemariam are immigrants from Ethiopia - Yosef coming to America first through Sudan then Europe in the 1970s, Mariam coming three years later, hoping (but not) that they are still married. Their tenuous relationship will need to navigate new American customs and expectations in Peoria, IL and also survive the trauma they left behind. Much of this is recounted by their son, Jonas, living in roughly present-day NYC who is in a tenuous relationship of his own with his lawyer wife Angela. They met while working at an immigration intake center. Jonas with a degree in show more English lit from Columbia is great at embellishing the intake forms to capture the dire circumstances the immigrants and refugees fled; it also is a reflection of his ability to lie and re-create truth to suit his needs. This is a need for his childhood too - and it is one Angela shares, growing up poor with an incompetent single mother. So the theme becomes how much of what happened to all of them is true and what are the lasting scars that may be the truest part of their stories? One of the strains on Mariam and Yosef's marriage is subtle bids for control, mostly won by Yosef with physical dominance. This is reflected in a singular story used to illustrate their marriage - a road trip they begin from IL to TN when Mariam is pregnant with Jonas. One of the strains on Jonas and Angela's marriage is Jonas' underemployment and emotional distance, which also manifests as a need for control. Neither union has the resilience needed to survive, but there is much learned and understood in the process of disintegration, all of it captured in breathtaking prose: "...he [my father] felt the abrupt and dramatic shift in the air that precedes violent confrontation. Something vibrated, buzzed. If there was a way to narrate it, he would have described it as the tiniest particles that make up the air we breathe becoming suddenly charged and electrified with a palpable life all their own. The world around us is alive, he would have said, with our emotions and thoughts, and the space between any two people contains them all. He had learned early in his life that before any violent gesture there is a moment when the act is born, not as something that can be seen or felt, but by the change it precipitates in the air." I think this captures the violence he fled from, but unfortunately, sometimes a change in scenery does not change the individual; violence perpetuates itself. And yet there is a slim note of hope at the end. show less

“We accumulate memories and in doing so begin to make our first tentative steps backward in time, to say things such as ‘I remember when I was.’ And from there our lives grow into multiple dimensions until eventually we learn to regret and finally to imagine.” Dinaw Mengestu’s “How to Read the Air” explores the belief that memory is the story of what has been, might have been, or never was. If two people experience an event, whose memory of the time is real? Can the telling of a memory enlarge and change it’s very shape? Jonas, a teacher, is a memory teller. He tells the story of his own life with his wife, Angela, and that of his parents via his memory, with his interpretations and embroideries. He speaks of his show more childhood memories of his home life: “…it was easy for terrible things to happen to women when they were out of sight. They took hard hits, and then later slept in your bed where you could protect them.” He tells his students of his father’s flight from Ethiopia: “And while this part of the story wasn’t true to anything I, or anyone I knew had ever experienced, it had an air of serendipitous salvation that struck me as being so unlikely that one had to believe it had occurred that way.” He ruins his marriage to Angela with his embellished memories and outright lies. He is a great storyteller; and he is a superb liar. He is lost emotionally because he has lost his family; knowing them mostly through memory rather than contact. Mengestu employs descriptive prose that is powerful and believable; sometimes realistic and sometimes almost mystical as he explores the concept of memory. “We persist and linger longer than we think, leaving traces of ourselves wherever we go. If you take that away, then we all simply vanish.” This book is a wonderful read that keeps you contemplating it's themes for days. show less

Jonas Woldemariam, the American born son of Ethiopian immigrants, has recently lost his teaching job in Manhattan and separated from his wife. He seeks to recreate his late parents' journey from Peoria, Illinois to Nashville, Tennessee, in an effort to learn about their lives and to understand his own confused and troubled past.

Jonas was born in the Midwest, not quite American nor fully African, and he is ostracized and treated as an exotic by his classmates and neighbors. His home is not a sanctuary, due to his father's violent outbursts towards him and his mother, and he copes by internalizing his thoughts and feelings, and making himself as invisible as possible to his father. He obtains a bachelor's degree in literature, moves to show more New York, and takes on a series of odd jobs. While working at a center that provides legal aid to recent immigrants he meets Angela, an African-American law student, and the two eventually marry.

Angela loves Jonas, and through her connections at work she is able to get him a job teaching English literature at a private Upper East Side school. On the surface it would seem as though Jonas would be content; however, his self isolation and inability to express or articulate his feelings and his frequent tendency to lie or spout half-truths frustrate Angela, who throws herself into her work and spends less time with her husband as a result.

After the couple separate, Jonas finds himself completely alone, as he has no friends or family. He has no clear sense of who he is or what he should do now that he is completely free. He realizes that he must go back to the past, to recreate his parents' journeys and lives as best he can, in order to determine what he should do with his life.

[How to Read the Air] has some roots in the author's past, as he did grow up in Peoria, but it is far from an autobiographical novel. On my initial reading I was somewhat lukewarm toward this book, despite its beautiful writing and richly portrayed characters, mainly because I could not identify or understand Jonas. However, after reading several recent interviews of Mengestu and thinking about the book over the past few days, I have come to appreciate it much more, as I find that this book, and its protagonist, have a lot to say about the life of an immigrant to America, along with anyone who finds himself caught between cultures or engaged in a struggle of self discovery. The book is filled with melancholy, yet it ends on a hopeful note, as Jonas is a sympathetic character despite his many flaws and shortcomings. show less

Ever had a main character that just needed a good shaking, or perhaps a slap upside the head? Jonas certainly qualifies in my estimation. The only son of Ethopian refugees, he is raised within a highly abusive marriage by individuals who are damaged by their refugee experience. Jonas manages to screw up his life and his marriage by never fully committing to ANYTHING. This is the antithesis of the immigrant boot-strap story we've come to expect. I guess its good to be reminded that not everything is sweetness and light, but I found Jonas annoying. I was hoping he'd get his stuff in a pile, but he never did and I was left disappoined by the lack of a happy ending.

Mengestu's second novel explores themes of the immigrant experience in America. The protagonist, Jonas, is the son of Ethiopian immigrants. Out of contact with his parents and disconnected from his roots, Jonas struggles to construct an identity for himself, often inventing stories about himself and his family, to the point that fact and fiction become entangled.

There are several separate stories here: Jonas' father's exodus to America; Jonas' parents' road trip through the Midwest; Jonas' present-day retracing of that trip; and the recently past storyline of Jonas' rocky relationship with his wife, Angela. There is the potential for this to be somewhat disorienting to the reader but the author handles the multiple threads well. For the show more reader, it becomes difficult to tell what's real and what is not in the narrative, thereby not just telling but showing the reader about the disorienting experience of immigration. The author captures the psychological impact of being an immigrant--the shaky identity, the past with gaping holes, the difficulty connecting in a solid way to people around you or even to your own future.

This was a very interesting read that was hard to put down, and a very worthy addition to any collection of literary fiction that focuses on the immigrant experience. show less

To me this was a beautifully written, multi-layered story of survival and self-discovery and one I will go back to to re-read all the passages I've marked.

When we first meet Jonas Woldemariam, he’s at the beginning of retracing a trip his parents took across the Midwest 30 years ago, just before he was born. During this journey, he recalls a number of unfortunate recent events in his life--his father’s death, his failing marriage and the loss of his job, which is related to the story of his father’s tortuous immigration to the United States from Ethiopia.

Pretty quickly you realize that Jonas is good at making things up and so you’re not really sure how much of what he’s telling you is true. The narrative jumps around a lot show more chronologically and that can also be disorienting. But eventually I realized that the main journey is the one Jonas is making emotionally.

His father was an angry man who lashed out verbally and physically and Jonas perfected the art of “blending into the background” as a child so as not to be noticed by his father. “I had always suspected that at some early point in my life, while still living with my parents and their daily battles, I had gone numb as a tactical strategy.” Unfortunately, his childhood coping skills have become a major problem for him as an adult.

Mengestu’s writing has a melancholy tone and the story was occasionally almost too painful to continue reading. But I loved the ending and was glad I finished Jonas’ journey. Early on Jonas is thinking about his father and says: “He had realized at a young age . . . that the world was a cruel and unfair place, and yet despite that, he . . . couldn’t stand to see some days end.” You’re never sure whether his father ever actually said this but by the end you know that Jonas could have and that he’s finally arrived at a better place.

Highly recommended--4 ½ stars. show less