How To Read The Air

How To Read The Air, by Dinaw Mengestu, is a novel of exile, though this isn't immediately, forcefully apparent. It is sad, tragic, but the weight of it all doesn't come upon the reader at once but gradually builds. It is also about narrative: the stories we tell and the stories we don't tell. Jonas, the protagonist, invents narratives for the immigrants he aids in a legal clinc; soon, fiction enters his own life as he creates and reconstructs stories of his family. The need for the stories, the narratives on which we construct our identities and our relationships becomes a preoccupation for Jonas, as he traces his parent's marriage and the demise of his own, interweaving the time lines of the two sets of couples. Jonas barely knows how much he needs these narratives until the stories begin to converge on one another, and this, too, is tragic. Jonas uses his position as a teacher to begin to tell the story of a father whose past is elusive and unknown; even he, the teller, does not know how the story actually began or how, exactly, it might end.

When I returned to the academy the next day, I realized that my father's story had already gone on longer than I had intended, and that soon it was going to have to come to an end...While the rest of the teachers were rfulfilling their mandate to prepare the students for what most assumed would be a bright, affluent future, my students indulged me by letting me pass off this story as being somehow relevant to their own lives. I told myself that it was for their sake that the story of my father's life and near death in Sudan had to have a fittingly moving denouement.

The unknowable parts of his parents and their lives, and the dearth of these narratives proves destructive for Jonas. The elliptical nature of this book, while appropriate for the themes, might be a bit too slippery for some readers; I found it hard to gauge where Mengestu was writing skillfully and where he was just having difficulty drawing out character. To whit, in a passage about Jonas' mother, we get this: "It was better, she believed, not to translate emotions into actions, to let them lie dormant, because once they were expressed, there was no drawing them back." Yes, perhaps, but these characters often remain ciphers. That may just be the intent.