How to Read the Air
Oct 2010 · Penguin
5.0star
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eBook
320
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About this eBook
A "beautifully written"* (New York Times Book Review) novel of redemption by a prize-winning international literary star.
From the acclaimed author of The Beautiful Things that Heaven Bears comes a heartbreaking literary masterwork about love, family, and the power of imagination.
Following the death of his father Yosef, Jonas Woldemariam feels compelled to make sense of the volatile generational and cultural ties that have forged him. Leaving behind his marriage and job in New York, he sets out to retrace his mother and father's honeymoon as young Ethiopian immigrants and weave together a family history that will take him from the war-torn country of his parents' youth to a brighter vision of his life in America today. In so doing, he crafts a story- real or invented-that holds the possibility of reconciliation and redemption.
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A wrenching, beautifully-written novel that renders two sad, failed marriages -- the narrator's and his parents' -- with luminous, almost unbearable tenderness. In a complex weave of duplication, recollection, and imagination, the protagonist replicates a road trip taken by his parents early in their marriage, while he reminisces about his own recently-ended relationship and about his abusive and violent father's own circuitous and challenging journey from Ethiopia to the U.S., a partly reconstructed and partly fabricated narrative. I suppose I will have to read _The Beautiful Things That Heaven Bears_ now though I bet it will be equally painful.
About the author
Dinaw Mengestu was born in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia, in 1978. He is the recipient of a MacArthur Fellowship, a fellowship in fiction from the New York Foundation for the Arts and a Lannan Literary Fellowship, and was named a “20 under 40” writer to watch by The New Yorker. Mengestu’s writing has appeared in The New Yorker, Rolling Stone, Harper’s, Granta, and other publications. He lives with his family in Washington, D.C.
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