“According to the stories, children who opened boxes containing the last precious items of their parents were always granted some vital, significant revelation, or at the very least, a dark secret uncovered. Family histories are supposed to be riddled with such things, for without them how do we achieve that much-needed catharsis we’re all supposedly longing for?”

Book Review:

Review by Poornima Apte  (OCT 28, 2010)

If there’s one useful outcome that has come out of Jonas Woldermariam’s trying childhood, it is this: Jonas has become an expert at varnishing the truth. This ability to embellish facts comes in especially handy at Jonas’s first job. He works at a law firm that helps newly arrived immigrants with the asylum process. Jonas’s job is to help the immigrants with their essays and edit them for structure and grammar. But Jonas can’t help adding some spice to their stories—for example, it is not enough for a farmer to have fled oppression; Jonas carefully constructs a situation where the person’s house and all property are also totally burned down.

Such varnishing might seem harmless enough but the problem comes when Jonas tries to use the same tactic to address problems of his own. Months after he has lost this job because of downsizing, Jonas receives word of his father’s death. The news reaches him at a time when his marriage to wife Angela is failing and his job as a teacher of English at a local school is also on its last legs. Jonas sees his father’s death as an opportunity to revisit the past and to try to learn more about his parents—something he could never do when the three of them were together. After all, as Jonas says, they were never a family unit—just members of a jazz trio playing their respective parts and exiting. Jonas figures the best way to find out more would be to retrace an eventful car trip that his parents made in the early years of their marriage—from Peoria, Illinois to Nashville.

As it turns out Jonas’s dad, Yosef Woldemariam, meted out severe abuse to his new bride and later, even when Jonas is around, the boy is forever traumatized, trying to anticipate when the next blow will fly. “As a child I learned quickly that a fight was never far off or long in the making, and imagined it sometimes as a real physical presence lurking in the shadows of whatever space my parents happened to occupy at that given moment—a grocery store, a car, a restaurant,” author Dinaw Mengestu writes. Mengestu, recently named to New Yorker’s 20 Under 40 Writers to Watch list, does a fantastic job portraying the toll abuse extracts from all its victims. The descriptions of Yosef’s violent rages might be brief but they are utterly gut wrenching.

Interspersed in the story about Jonas’s parents are details about Yosef’s life before he arrives in the United States. He works in Sudan for a long time as a laborer at a sea port until one day his employer helps him travel to Europe in the cargo hold of a large ship. The details of the ship ride are horrific and sad and Jonas begins to see the life that must have turned his father so violent to all those around him.

Mengestu’s debut novel, The Beautiful Things That Heaven Bears, was a powerful novel about the immigrant experience. This new novel too beautifully captures the alienation felt by all immigrants. How to Read the Air not only describes the effect of migration on the elder Woldemariams but by contrasting Jonas’s outlook on life against his wife, Angela’s, Mengestu also shows how the parents’ alienation works its way down to the next generation.

Angela, a lawyer by profession, is portrayed as the eager overachiever—she comes from a deprived childhood herself and is eager to fit into a class of society she has always aspired to. Jonas’s inability to readily do so is at “the heart of what worried Angela—that despite our being married we had yet to form a life as commonly prescribed by others.”

Towards the end, as Mengestu chronicles the last days of Jonas’s teaching stint, he shows Jonas narrating the story of his father’s displacement to his students. Here old skills come in handy and Jonas peppers his father’s story with details whose truth is not immediately verifiable. It’s not clear whether these versions of his father’s history are true or made up. At least it grants Jonas a measure of peace.

The problem with How to Read the Air is that it gets too weighed down by an air of melancholy—Jonas turns out to be so listless and dull that you eventually don’t invest much in wanting to learn more about him. On the other hand, the novel is full of beautiful writing and is worth reading for this reason alone.

As tempting as it might be to read this novel only as an immigrant’s narrative, it is equally a story about abuse and the deep marks it can leave on its most vulnerable victims. After a childhood spent trying to “read the air” for signs of trouble, Jonas finds he is not able to sustain any meaningful interactions with the people he loves. The isolation suffered as an immigrant is bad enough—the abuse heaped in addition, makes the alienation complete.

AMAZON READER RATING:	from 37 readers
PUBLISHER:	Riverhead Hardcover (October 14, 2010)
REVIEWER:	Poornima Apte
AVAILABLE AS A KINDLE BOOK?	YES! Start Reading Now!
AUTHOR WEBSITE:	Wikipedia page on Dinaw Mengestu
EXTRAS:	Reading Guide and Excerpt
MORE ON MOSTLYFICTION:	Read our review of: All Our Names Another immigrant story with a dysfunctional family: Try to Remember by Iris Gomez

Bibliography:

• The Beautiful Things That Heaven Bears (2007)
• How to Read The Air (2010)
• All Our Names (March 2014)

Hailu was incredulous. “Do these children think they can take down a monarchy of three thousand years? Do they think all they have to do is raise a few signs and the world will change?” He was counting his prayer beads one by one. “That their ideas can stop bullets?”

Book Review:

Review by Poornima Apte (JAN 12, 2010)

Emperor Haile Selassie ruled Ethiopia for more than four decades. Stories about him are legendary even today. Debut author Maaza Mengiste’s book Beneath The Lion’s Gaze is set during a period of history when the emperor is just on his way out; it takes place over a few years around 1974.

This period was one of the most turbulent times in the country’s history. A student uprising to protest the emperor’s neglect of the famine-ravaged countryside soon got taken over by a “committee” – the Derg—fueled by the Soviet Union. Communism succeeded in replacing monarchy and the brutality only got worse.

Like authors before her, Mengiste tries to reduce the scale of the canvas by detailing the lives of one family during the course of the country’s events. The patriarch, Doctor Hailu, practices at a local hospital and as the book opens, is desperately hanging on to his wife, Selam, who has suffered severe cardiac arrest. Selam is not his only worry however. Hailu’s younger son, Dawit, is a hotheaded revolutionary. As he sees the Derg take over and realizes that this was not the new government he wanted as replacement for the emperor, he takes to anti-government activities with a renewed passion. These subversive activities will put the entire family—including older brother Yonas, his wife Sara, and their young daughter, Tizita—in harm’s way. There are a whole host of related characters—a shop-owner, neighbors and even Dawit’s friend, Mickey, who was once a sympathizer to the students’ cause but has now become a part of the government’s killing machine.

Maaza Mengiste portrays the full and gory range of human brutality in her writing. There’s plenty of violence and torture here—even to make the toughest reader flinch. Towards the end though, the brutality seems like an endless detailing of events and the reader might get tired of (or worse, inured to) the many incidents of oppression.

This might be mainly because of the one problem in the book—the characters just never seem to grow over the pages and time. Practically every one of them—Hailu the father, Dawit the revolutionary, Yonas the sensible older son—seems static. With a rare exception, the way the book’s characters start out at the beginning is pretty much how they end. Since there isn’t much character growth, even if Mengiste has created people the reader can empathize with, it’s easy to look upon them as mere props. And therein lies the problem. When you’re trying to narrate a country’s horrific history through the eyes of one family, you have to make that family organic and malleable. While they’re witnesses to history (and yes, even participants), Mengiste stops short of detailing the lingering effect history doubtless will have on all these family members we care about.

The “lions” imagery doesn’t seem to work too well either—Incidentally, emperor Selassie was spoken of as so strong and courageous (The Lion of Judah) that even lions bowed to him. Later in the book, Dawit takes on the mantle of the revolutionary lion but the metaphor is not fully articulated or integrated neatly into the plot.

Where Mengiste does succeed however, is in creating an absorbing history lesson—one the reader will not soon forget. Maaza Mengiste has taken on important themes and subject material in her debut novel and given that, Beneath The Lion’s Gaze is a commendable debut effort.

Mengiste joins a growing and talented set of writers from the African continent. It is not hard to imagine that this gifted writer’s voice will grow only stronger with time—and will yet roar.

AMAZON READER RATING:	from 22 readers
PUBLISHER:	W. W. Norton & Company (January 11, 2010)
REVIEWER:	Poornima Apte
AVAILABLE AS A KINDLE BOOK?	YES! Start Reading Now!
AUTHOR WEBSITE:	Maaza Mengiste
EXTRAS:	Reading Guide and Excerpt
MORE ON MOSTLYFICTION:	Also set in Ethiopia: Cutting for Stone by Abraham Verghese More in Africa: A River Called Time by Mia Couto A Blade of Grass by Lewis DeSoto

Bibliography:

• Beneath the Lion’s Gaze (January 2010)