This novel centers on the dense, weaving relationship between our protagonist, Mamush, and his father, Samuel. In its form, the novel has experimental elements that work well with its themes of immigration, disconnection, and loss. The central trope of the taxi cab also becomes formalized, working as a metaphorical and literal vehicle for explaining the relationship between Mamush and Samuel.

The most compelling part of this novel for me was the subtlety with which Mengestu captures the unconventional father-son relationship at the heart of the story. Samuel and Mamush’s mother have a friendship but not a romantic connection, but due to circumstances beyond their control (I won’t spoil this detail) end up conceiving Mamush. His mother does not necessarily want Samuel as the father of her child and Samuel had no intention of becoming a father yet or in this way. Thus, Samuel is not quite situated as Mamush’s father when he is a child, even as it becomes clear, over the course of the book, that the father-son framework for their relationship is ultimately inescapable. What proceeds is a meditation on how the cruelty of the world (war, imperialism, racism) shapes Samuel’s fate (particularly his socioeconomic oppression and struggle with addiction) and his relationship with Mamush. They love one another deeply and yet the articulation of that love is always being suffocated by their environment and history.

This initial father-son dyad is paralleled powerfully by Mamush’s relationship with his own young son, who is waiting at home for him in Paris with his wife, Hannah. We sense that Mamush is struggling to stay with his wife and child due to his own demons, especially how he is haunted by his parents’ traumatic pasts. The book suggests that unraveling Samuel’s life will somehow enable him to move forward with Hannah and his son. In the end, Mengestu gives us hope that Mamush has found his way back to his family—on both sides of the Atlantic.

A moving, brilliant, intricate book, I highly recommend this novel to other readers!

The young man was stoic in personality from a tender age. A first generation US citizen of Ethiopian parents, a paranoid mother and an absent mysterious father who may be the family friend from Ethiopia, Samuel, the man who comes and goes out of the lives of Mamush and his mother. Flashbacks within flashbacks narrated by Mamush in a prosaic prose style, a journalist with aspirations of writing a serious book about Ethiopians migrant to the United States. Ethiopians in the United States, one gets the impression, are the only Africans from the continent who retain a sense of their homeland as one end of a nexus of an identity of an Ethiopian consciousness in a new land with, on the other end, a willful sense of not belonging–though an Ethiopian may be physically in the United States, they are actually in Ethiopia.

Mamush, inheritor of an Ethiopian consciousness, has no Ethiopia where he can return. The feeling of having to get back to an Ethiopia that no longer exists as the Ethiopia left behind, projected by his mother and Samuel, manifest as his writing projects about migrants. Samuel is in constant motion, as a taxi driver, his dream to have his own taxi company to transport Ethiopians throughout the United States. Mamush escaped. He moved to France, married a French woman and, with her, had a son. His reluctant visit back to the States to his fragmented memories and the lies and silences of those who raised him, are pieces of a puzzled life. Samuel, a latter day Strether from Henry James’ The Ambassadors, tells the young man that Ethiopians laugh, failing to convey his wisdom to the young man in the saddest of novels.

My thank you to NetGalley and Knopf Publisher for an Advanced Reader’s Copy

The story flowed well and the characters were well developed. I recommend this book and look forward to more from this author.


****Thanks to NetGalley and the publisher for providing an ARC in exchange for my honest review****