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ALL OUR NAMES
Author:
Mengestu, Dinaw
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Class:
Fiction
Age: Adult
Language: English
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LC: PS3613.E
Print Run: 35000
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ISBN-13: 9780385349987
LCCN: 2013031632
Imprint: Knopf
Publisher: Random House
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Pub Date: 03/04/2014
Availability: Out of Stock Indefinitely
List: $25.95
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Hardcover
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Physical Description:
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255 p. ; 25 cm.
H 9.5",
W 6.6",
D 1.1",
1.2875 lbs.
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LC Series:
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Brodart Sources:
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Brodart's Insight Catalog: Adult
Brodart's TOP Adult Titles
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Bibliographies:
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Fiction Core Collection, 19th ed.
Fiction Core Collection, 20th ed.
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Awards:
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Kirkus Best Books
Kirkus Starred Reviews
Library Journal Starred Reviews
New York Times Notable Books
Publishers Weekly Annual Best Books Selections
Publishers Weekly Starred Reviews
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Starred Reviews:
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Kirkus Reviews
Library Journal
Publishers Weekly
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TIPS Subjects:
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Psychological Fiction
Women's Studies
African American & Black
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BISAC Subjects: |
FICTION / Literary
FICTION / Coming of Age
FICTION / War & Military
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LC Subjects:
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African Americans, Fiction
Alienation (Social psychology), Fiction
Identity (Psychology), Fiction
Psychological fiction
Students, Foreign, United States, Fiction
Women social workers, United States
Women social workers, United States, Fiction
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SEARS Subjects: |
African Americans, Fiction
Alienation (Social psychology), Fiction
Foreign students, United States, Fiction
Identity (Psychology), Fiction
Psychological fiction
Women social workers, Fiction
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Reading Programs: |
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| Annotations |
| Brodart's TOP Adult Titles | 12/01/2013 |
| Fleeing his war-torn country in the midst of an African revolution does little to stop the haunting memories as a young man passes himself off as an exchange student in America and falls for a social worker. With so much left undone and the memory of the leader who sacrificed so much to free the young man, the new American must come to terms with who he was, who he is, and where to go from here. 272pp., 35K, Auth res: New York, NY, Tour |
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| Starred Reviews: |
| Kirkus Reviews | 02/01/2014 |
| What's in a name? Identity of a kind, perhaps, but nothing like stability, and perhaps nothing like truth. So Mengestu (How to Read the Air, 2010, etc.) ponders in this elegiac, moving novel, his third. Himself an immigrant, Mengestu is alert to the nuances of what transplantation and exile can do to the spirit. Certainly so, too, is his protagonist--or, better, one of two protagonists who just happen to share a name, for reasons that soon emerge. One narration is a sequence set in and around Uganda, perhaps in the late 1960s or early 1970s, in a post-independence Africa. (We can date it only by small clues: Rhodesia is still called that, for instance, and not Zimbabwe.) But, as in a V.S. Naipaul story, neither the country nor the time matter much in a tale about human universals, in this case the universal longing for justice and our seemingly universal inability to achieve it without becoming unjust ourselves. The narrator, riding into the place he calls "the capital," sheds his old identity straightaway: "I gave up all the names my parents had given me." Isaac, whom he meets on campus, is, like him, a would-be revolutionary, and in that career trajectory lies a sequence of tragedies, from ideological betrayals to acts of murder. The region splintering, their revolution disintegrating, Isaac follows the ever-shifting leader he reveres into the mouth of hell. Meanwhile, Isaac--the name now transferred, along with a passport--flees to the snowy Midwest, where he assumes the identity of an exchange student, marked by a curious proclivity for Victorian English: "I remember thinking after that first afternoon that I felt like I was talking with someone out of an old English novel," says the caseworker, Helen, with whom he will fall in love. Neither Isaac can forget the crimes he has witnessed and committed, and the arc of justice that each seeks includes personal accountability. Redemption is another matter, but both continue the fight, whether in the scrub forest of Africa or at a greasy spoon somewhere along the Mississippi River. Weighted with sorrow and gravitas, another superb story by Mengestu, who is among the best novelists now at work in America. 255pg. KIRKUS MEDIA LLC, c2014. |
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| Library Journal | 03/15/2014 |
| "I came for the writers and stayed for the war," says one of the narrators in this latest book from Mengestu (How To Read the Air), which in its focused and lean, beautiful writing is his best book yet. Mengestu blends this narrator's story of an African homeland rent by warfare he helped foment with that of Helen, the social worker with whom he becomes involved after escaping to America. Through his characters, the author examines Africa's plight (paralleled by continuing racism in America), the risks of revolution, the lure of power, and, especially, the enduring strength of love. Our young man in Africa has arrived in the city from the hinterlands, eager for an education. He learns something very different from what he expected when he meets the charismatic Isaac, who stirs an uprising at the university (where he isn't even registered) and finally pulls his new friend into a rebellion that turns shockingly bloody, sometimes hurting those it would help. Woven into the story of this essential friendship is the socially reticent Helen's fierce and touching involvement with the client she knows as Isaac. VERDICT A highly recommended read that's as absorbing as it is thought-provoking; the ending is a real punch. [See Prepub Alert, 9/9/13.]--Barbara Hoffert, Library Journal. Barbara Hoffert, Library Journal. 288p. LIBRARY JOURNAL, c2014. |
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| Publishers Weekly | 11/18/2013 |
| Immigrant stories are often about self-invention, but in his latest novel, in which an African escaping to America cannot leave his past behind, McArthur Fellow Mengestu (How to Read the Air) portrays the intersection of cultures experienced by the immigrant with unsettling perception. Each of the two narrators--one speaking from the past in Africa, one in present-day America--has a relationship with a young man named Isaac, and the two take turns describing these relationships. The African narrator, a 25-year-old aspiring writer, recounts how he leaves his rural village to subsist on the margins of a university in a city that he simply calls "the Capital." There, he finds a friend in the magnetic Isaac, a young revolutionary who draws him into an antigovernment insurgency. The second narrator is Helen, a Midwestern social worker, who takes under her wing and into her heart an African refugee named Isaac, knowing little about his situation and nothing of his history. The action is set after the first flush of African independence, as democratic self-rule proves elusive, while in America racial and social divides persist. In Africa, Isaac, the revolutionary, endures beatings and torture before confronting his own side's penchant for violence. In America, Helen and the man she calls Isaac face their own intractable obstacles. Mengestu evokes contrasting landscapes but focuses on his characters--Isaac, the saddened visionary; Isaac, the secretive refugee; Helen, the sympathetic lover--who are all caught in a cycle of connection and disruption, engagement and abandonment, hope and disillusion. Agent: P.J. Mark, Janklow & Nesbit Associates. (Mar.). 288p. PUBLISHERS WEEKLY, c2013. |
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| Journal Reviews |
| BookPage | 03/01/2014 |
| Dinaw Mengestu's third novel skillfully blends two disparate narratives--the account of an African revolution and the story of a survivor's new life in America--to create a moving portrait of the dilemma of identity. All Our Names is set in the 1970s, in the early days of Idi Amin's repressive reign in Uganda. An unnamed narrator, a young man who dreams of becoming a writer, crosses the border from his native Ethiopia and meets Isaac, his contemporary from the slums of Kampala. The two "became friends the way two stray dogs find themselves linked by treading the same path every day in search of food and companionship." They spend their days at the capital's university campus and watch as what begin as almost playful protests, chief among them what the narrator calls their "paper revolution," spark brutal retaliation from government thugs. Soon, the idealism of the uprising curdles into violence, with Isaac assuming a prominent role in the anti-government force. Mengestu exposes our very human inability to truly know even those closest to us. In chapters that alternate with that account, Helen, a social worker in a small Midwestern college town, provides the novel's other narrative voice. The man she knows as Isaac has escaped from the African turmoil, bearing scars both physical and psychic. Helen quickly is transformed from his "chaperone into Middle America" into his lover, but the bigotry of the times compels them to conceal their interracial relationship. Despite their intimacy, Helen is haunted by her inability to penetrate to the core of Isaac's being. That unease is only one manifestation of the conflicting impulses that seem to define these characters. How is Isaac transformed from prankster to hardened revolutionary, someone "trying to end the nightmare this nation has become"? The narrator, who "came for the writers and stayed for the war" finds "the difference wasn't as great as I would have thought," and yet he vacillates between detachment and active, if reluctant, participation in the revolt. Helen, who still lives with her mother at age 30, struggles to resolve the tension between her small-town roots and the exoticism of her affair with a man from an alien culture whose past is veiled from her. In each instance, Mengestu's unadorned prose hints at, rather than discloses, the secrets each of his characters harbors. But it's in their mystery that he exposes a persistent fact of our existence--our inability to truly know even those closest to us. Harvey Freedenberg. 272pg. BOOKPAGE, c2014. |
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| Booklist | 02/15/2014 |
| Mengestu's previous novels (The Beautiful Things That Heaven Bears, 2007; How to Read the Air, 2010) established him as a talented writer interested in the imaginations, memories, and interpersonal collisions of African immigrants in the U.S. His latest, which presents the parallel narratives of a melancholy social worker in the American Midwest and a bookish witness to revolutionary violence in Uganda, returns to themes of alienation and exile but also explores the challenges and possibilities of love amid bleak circumstances. Both of his protagonists are drawn to a man named Isaac. Both stories take place in the early 1970s, a time of conflict in African states emerging from colonial rule as well as a time of persistent racial tensions in the U.S. The author highlights the dense slums of Kampala with the same intensity as he does the flatness of his midwestern farm town. But Mengestu is less interested in photographing a particular historical moment than he is fascinated by the dangers each setting imposes upon his vulnerable protagonists and their fragile relationships. And in the end, despite the bleak settings, tenderness somehow triumphs. Driscoll, Brendan. 288p. AMERICAN LIBRARY ASSOCIATION, c2014. |
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| Library Journal Prepub Alert | 09/09/2013 |
| Winner of the National Book Foundation's 5 Under 35 Award, The New Yorker's 20 Under 40 Award, and a 2012 MacArthur Foundation Fellowship, Mengestu opened his career with the bittersweetly tantalizing The Beautiful Things That Heaven Bears, then truly proved himself breathtakingly with How To Read the Air. Here's his next work, set in an African country racked by revolution. The hero abandons his university studies to join the uprising in the streets, then finds idealism fading into heedless violence and flees to America, where he's haunted by memories of what he has done. He also recalls the revolutionary leader who brought him to the streets and thereafter assured his safe passage from the country through personal sacrifice. I'm expecting another knockout; with an eight-city tour to Boston, Chicago, Los Angeles, New York, Philadelphia, San Francisco, Seattle, and Washington, DC. 288p. LJ Prepub Alert Online Review. LIBRARY JOURNAL, c2013. |
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9780385349987,dl.it[0].title
| Review Citations |
| New York Times Book Review | 03/23/2014 |
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