All Our Names Author: Dinaw Mengestu | Language: English | ISBN:
B00F1W0DLS | Format: PDF
All Our Names Description
From acclaimed author Dinaw Mengestu, a recipient of the National Book Foundation’s 5 Under 35 award,
TheNew Yorker’s 20 Under 40 award, and a 2012 MacArthur Foundation genius grant, comes an unforgettable love story about a searing affair between an American woman and an African man in 1970s America and an unflinching novel about the fragmentation of lives that straddle countries and histories.
All Our Names is the story of two young men who come of age during an African revolution, drawn from the safe confines of the university campus into the intensifying clamor of the streets outside. But as the line between idealism and violence becomes increasingly blurred, the friends are driven apart—one into the deepest peril, as the movement gathers inexorable force, and the other into the safety of exile in the American Midwest. There, pretending to be an exchange student, he falls in love with a social worker and settles into small-town life. Yet this idyll is inescapably darkened by the secrets of his past: the acts he committed and the work he left unfinished. Most of all, he is haunted by the beloved friend he left behind, the charismatic leader who first guided him to revolution and then sacrificed everything to ensure his freedom.
Elegiac, blazing with insights about the physical and emotional geographies that circumscribe our lives,
All Our Names is a marvel of vision and tonal command. Writing within the grand tradition of Naipul, Greene, and Achebe, Mengestu gives us a political novel that is also a transfixing portrait of love and grace, of self-determination and the names we are given and the names we earn.
From the Hardcover edition.- File Size: 1338 KB
- Print Length: 272 pages
- Publisher: Knopf (March 4, 2014)
- Sold by: Random House LLC
- Language: English
- ASIN: B00F1W0DLS
- Text-to-Speech: Enabled
X-Ray:
- Lending: Not Enabled
- Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #3,721 Paid in Kindle Store (See Top 100 Paid in Kindle Store)
- #8
in Kindle Store > Kindle eBooks > Literature & Fiction > Literary Fiction > African American - #30
in Kindle Store > Kindle eBooks > Literature & Fiction > Genre Fiction > War - #41
in Books > Literature & Fiction > Genre Fiction > War
- #8
in Kindle Store > Kindle eBooks > Literature & Fiction > Literary Fiction > African American - #30
in Kindle Store > Kindle eBooks > Literature & Fiction > Genre Fiction > War - #41
in Books > Literature & Fiction > Genre Fiction > War
One of the rewarding aspects of reviewing books for the Amazon Vine program is the depth and variety that has resulted in my reading experience. There is certainly nothing cliché about Mengestu's novel; indeed, nothing in my previous experience really helps me to categorize it. Actually, in a way, it almost seems to be two parallel "autobiographies", rendered in alternating chapters. However, Isaac's chapters all deal with his previous life in Africa, especially centering around his relationship with the "real" Isaac, whose passport brought him to the small town of Laurel. Helen's chapters deal with the present, and her struggles to define the parameters of her risky cross cultural and interracial relationship with Isaac.
One aspect of this narrative that I found difficult was the lack of real place and time markers. Again, I'm thankful for Google, which provided background information on African independence, giving dates in the 1960's and `70's. That does correspond with the time of maximum racial tension in the US, during which a couple like Isaac and Helen would indeed have been met with the kind of ostracism they experienced even in the Midwest. Given that understanding, I found the way in which the author handles the difficult "dance" his two lovers go through extremely accurate. It is, in fact, refreshing to have a love story in which the difficulties are genuine and cultural, not the psychological conflicts resulting from stereotypical "battles of the sexes".
Without in any way overstating his case, Mengestu manages to give a vivid and harrowing sense of the pointless destruction of the "revolution/liberation" chaos that followed the withdrawal of European domination from the African continent.
In the middle of this exquisite book is a perfect metaphor. It is the story of a town that existed as long as one person dreamed of it night. "In the beginning, everyone kept some part of the city alive in their dreams." But one day people grew tired of the burden and wished to dream of other lands or hopes for the future. A young man announces he will take the burden and dream of the city each night. However as the citizens relinquish their pictures of the city, the young man changes the scene little by little. Finally people begin to disappear and the dreamers become aware of what they had lost, but the city of memory was lost.
That story is as precise a summary of this book as any other, mostly the realities are different. Mengestu paints that murky world bordering on distrust in which one's true name is unlikely to be known. The story of Isaac and his friend takes place in the nightmare of Amin's Uganda and concerns the young men who try to rebel. In alternating chapters, we meet a young American woman, Helen, who has befriended Isaac some unknown time after the strife. She is a social worker, now numbed by the world's misery. The African man and the white woman make a threatening pair to many in their claustrophobic town. To add to her misery, Helen is sure she knows little of truth about her lover.
The imagery of the novel is precise and unhurried. Violence is almost under reported in a tone that accepts that such is the way of that world. The relationships of the young rebels and later the lovers are marked by tests of trust based on the merest of evidence. The unease and the ill defined threat are created almost as afterthoughts as the characters struggle to define themselves and the people they love.
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