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A Novel
by Dinaw Mengestu
Book Reviewed by: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.
After abandoning his once-promising career as a journalist in search of a new life in Paris, Mamush meets Hannah—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 Hannah 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 a 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 Hannah and 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. Breathtaking, commanding, unforgettable work from one of America's most prodigiously gifted novelists.
While suicide is the seminal event in the novel Someone Like Us, its characters anchor the story, shedding light on male anxiety and fragility. Ethiopian American writer Dinaw Mengestu portrays a relationship between two men as loyal, complicated, and gentle. While Samuel struggles to stay afloat as a cab driver in Virginia, his son Mamush is drowning in his marriage in France. The connection the men have with one another as they experience dissatisfaction is the putty that holds the story together. Mengestu has an authentic connection to this material, being Ethiopian American himself, and is skilled at writing male anxiety, so readers might wonder why he abandons us to figure out for ourselves what's wrong with Samuel based on the clues he provides. But maybe it is not we as readers who are abandoned but the immigrant characters who are forced into isolation...continued
Full Review
(953 words)
(Reviewed by Valerie Morales).
Abdul Saleh was fifty-nine when he died at home in Brooklyn in 2018 after working as a cab driver for thirty years. His roommate found him hanging from an electrical cord. His shifts had lasted as long as twelve hours but financial difficulties plagued him. It was hard to stay afloat in the era of Uber, Lyft, and rideshare companies that diluted demand.
The executive director of the New York Taxi Workers Alliance (NYTWA), Bhairavi Desai, summed up the situation bluntly: "This is what he knew. This was his job. This is how he knew to earn a living for himself and his family overseas in Yemen. Your days are spent hearing about your family in the middle of such a devastating war and you have little means to financially support them."
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Sometimes I think we're alone. Sometimes I think we're not. In either case, the thought is staggering.
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