Around the time I got a review copy of Dinaw Mengestu’s How to Read the Air (Random House Struik) I also received John Sutherland’s 50 Literature Ideas You Need to Know (Quercus), a handbook on literary terms and literary criticism.
Covering concepts such as hetero-glossia, semiology, mimesis and plagiarism, it’s a succinctly written ‘toolkit” for the ‘mature reader”. Among the terms the book explains are narrative and story.
Story and narrative, Sutherland writes, are not synonyms. ‘Story directs our attention towards what is told [and] narrative directs our attention to how it is told — to technique, not subject matter.”
How to Read the Air is the second novel by Mengestu. Children of the Revolution, his debut novel, was published in 2007 and won the Guardian First Book award. Last year The New Yorker featured the Ethiopian writer in its list of the 20 most interesting writers under the age of 40 living and working in the United States.
Unashamedly self-conscious
How to Read the Air is about Jonas Woldemariam, a reserved and dissatisfied English teacher, reliving the unhappy lives and dysfunctional marriage of his Ethiopian parents, Yosef and Mariam, by travelling on the same journey they took in 1974 (‘the only way to know any history is to walk in its footsteps”).
It’s a book that is unashamedly self-conscious in its narration and use of the journey motif to tell a story. Given its motif, the book starts with a travel detail: ‘It was four hundred eighty-four miles from my parents’ home in Peoria, Illinois, to Nashville, Tennessee, a distance that in a seven- year-old red Monte Carlo driving at roughly sixty miles an hour could be crossed in eight to twelve hours…”
This road motif presents not a few problems, chief among them that the trip was in 1974, months before the narrator was born. So Jonas imagines what his estranged parents were going through, their thoughts and actions. He is some kind of glorified omniscient narrator.
The novel is principally about two alternating stories, one of his parents and the other his dysfunctional marriage to African-American lawyer Angela.
Apocryphal story
Reading Mengestu (whom I praised in the Mail & Guardian’s book debate series as one of the most interesting writers from the continent) is a bit like listening to a storyteller who begins his story with a preamble that goes: ‘Actually this never happened, but if you will oblige me, I will tell you the apocryphal story about…” Of course, fiction involves being led along by the writer in a tale that you subconsciously know isn’t ‘true”. The success of a work of fiction depends on how the writer makes his yarn believable, recreating on the page characters and stories that live on in the mind long after we have cast the book aside.
Mengestu’s narrator, with a post-graduate degree in English, worked for an organisation helping refugees to become legal in the US. Often he took fictioneering liberties with his accounts of asylum seekers, adding a heart-rending detail here and smearing some blood there. Responding to a colleague who raised concerns, he explains: ‘I didn’t make them up, something similar had happened to someone else, although whether I had heard it in the office or read it in the newspaper I could no longer remember.”
Strictly speaking he was stretching facts, yet a bureaucrat who adjudicated the case wouldn’t think of it as fabrication. After all, would-be immigrants are an amorphous lot; what happens to one is as likely to happen to the next. If that sounds cruel, it’s because the fate of the migrant is torrid, from the destiny they are escaping to what awaits them in the host country.
It seems everything is stacked against them: the strange habits of the hosts, even stranger languages and living with fellow immigrants ‘who remained throughout our time living together as thoroughly unknown to me as on the day we first met”.
A side plot in the novel, infinitely more interesting, is the flight of the narrator’s father from a port town in Sudan as a stowaway to Europe before his arrival in the US. This story came out last year as an excerpt in The New Yorker. I dare say it’s one of the things that really works in the novel. I read the story last year and reading it again remained a pleasure.
Taut, emotive
Perhaps it works because we never quite know where the truth stops and where the fictional starts and vice versa. Or perhaps it’s a story in the old-fashioned mode: taut, emotive and where something actually happens. By melding his narratives with his father’s — adding spice here, stretching a fact there — what we have is an expansive and captivating story that is not marred by the question asked by a character in the book: ‘How much of what they’re saying is true?”
The recreation of his parents’ journey doesn’t quite work, not least because someone else’s journey is exactly that and no other person can ever walk in the footsteps of those who have gone before him. The narrator’s attempts to go into their thoughts, discuss what they could have been doing and explain their actions feel forced and sustained by artifice. The result is that in certain instances the author has to say things like ‘there are two directions the story can go in at this point” and engages in speculations that feel a tad too clever and gimmicky.
I feel that Mengestu’s clean, poetic prose is served best when he’s telling stories and not when he’s trying to engage in narrative tricks. In last year’s New Yorker interview he said he had begun his third novel ‘that is starting to gain a little momentum, enough, at least, for me to say that it exists. Maybe in a year or two, I’ll be able to say what it’s about.”
At the risk of sounding like a literary conservative, I hope his next offering is not afflicted by self-indulgent narrative angst and self-conscious technical trickery, but that adroit handling of narrative takes the story to another level, a satisfying one.