Erik Gleibermann in LA Review of Books:
HUMAN BEINGS ARE autobiographers by nature. Whether or not we ultimately write down any words, we can’t help mentally composing narratives out of our emotionally messy lives, attempting to seam coherence from chaos. Yet just as they provide a mode of self-discovery, so too can these autobiographical impulses cross over into self-deception—and the line between the two can be thin.
Dinaw Mengestu’s stunning new novel Someone Like Us follows an Ethiopian American man and his immigrant fatherlike figure, both of whom stumble along these kinds of shaky, self-constructed borders. The man—our narrator Mamush—is a lapsed journalist flying to Washington, DC, from Paris, where he lives with his wife, Hannah, and their toddler son. He’s en route to visit his mother and her lifelong friend Samuel, an overworked cabbie who has played an erratic avuncular role since Mamush was six years old and living with his mother in Chicago.
The novel builds around this two-day trip, including Mamush’s impulsive detour from Paris to Chicago and his subsequent arrival in DC, where he learns that Samuel has taken his own life. On the same day he receives this devastating news, Mamush opens the glove box of a taxi Samuel has recently driven to find a familiar US road atlas—one Mamush enjoyed studying as a child. Now, he’s too cynical to hope the worn booklet marked by Samuel’s initials might steer him to answers, “as if this were the kind of story where even minor objects were the source of great mystery and intrigue.”
More here.
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