How to Read the Air - Softcover

Dinaw Mengestu

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0099521032 ISBN 13: 9780099521037

Publisher: Vintage Books, 2012

Synopsis

Jonas, fresh from a failed marriage, is desperate to make sense of the ties that have forged him. How can he dream of a future when he can't make sense of his past? He hits the road, tracing the route that his parents - young Ethiopians in search of an identity as an American couple - took thirty year earlier to Nashville, Tennessee. In a stunning display of imagination he weaves together a history that takes him from the war-torn Ethiopia of his parents' youth to a brighter vision of his own life in contemporary America, a story - real or invented- that holds the possibility of reconciliation and redemption.

About this title

Review:

Amazon Best Books of the Month, October 2010: Early on in How to Read the Air--the second novel from the author of the widely acclaimed debut, The Beautiful Things That Heaven Bears--Jonas Woldemariam and his soon-to-be wife Angela attend a party, where they tell casual, false stories about Angela's absent father and arrive, all of a sudden, at the fulcrum of this elegant and unusual novel. "To them," Angela notes, "it's all just one story told over and over. Change the dates and the names but it's the same." It's a theme that Dinaw Mengestu revisits as he selects the chapters from many different stories that converge in Jonas. Chief among them is Yosef and Mariam's story: they are Jonas's Ethiopian parents, estranged from each other in a violent, loveless marriage, each striving more for America's security than for its dreams. Mengestu takes common ideals of how we're supposed to live--ranging from the importance of material progress to the popular notion that there's nothing more American than road trips and country music--and investigates them quite beautifully in characters who are genuine and visionary and do, as Jonas notes, "persist, whether we care to or not, with all our flaws and glory." --Anne Bartholomew

About the Author:

Dinaw Mengestu was born in Ethiopia in 1978 and is a graduate of Georgetown and Columbia universities. His 2007 debut novel, Children of the Revolution, won the Guardian First Book Award and the Los Angeles Times Book Prize. In 2010, he was included in the New Yorker's '20 Under 40' list of writers to watch.

About this edition

• Publisher: Vintage Books
• Publication date: 2012
• ISBN 10: 0099521032
• ISBN 13: 9780099521037
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 336