Someone Like Us, by Dinaw Mengestu: The Many Ways Stories Examine Truth

Our Reader-in-Chief Barack Obama chose Someone Like Us, by Dinaw Mengestu as one his favorite reads of 2024. I'd read and was amazed by one of Mengestu's previous books, All Our Names, so this novel published in July had been on my radar. But Obama's endorsement bumped it to the top of the priority list, as I continue to catch up on 2024 novels I missed when they were published.

This is a slim novel with a seemingly simple plot -- an American-Ethiopian journalist named Mamush is flying back to the US from Paris, where he now lives with his wife and special needs son, to visit his mother. Mamush's marriage is on the rocks for a number of reasons, but his drinking isn't helping. Neither does it help that Mamush misses his flight to Washington DC, and then for reasons he probably doesn't fully understand himself, gets on a flight to Chicago, instead. Chicago is the city of his childhood -- where he and his mother, and sometimes a mysterious fella named Samuel lived in a small apartment, trying to make ends meet.

Who is Samuel? The backstory paints him as a sort of father-figure and mentor to Mamush, but he has a complicated past and even more complicated relationship to Mamush's mother. We find out on the first page of the novel that Samuel, an Ethiopian immigrant like Mamush's mother, who has made his life's work as a cabdriver, has died around the same time Mamush arrived in Chicago.

But who is Samuel, really? Why has he had such an outsized influence on Mamush's life, for better or worse? And how did Samuel die? These are the central questions of this novel.

Mengestu is a genius, pure and simple. Even with the relative simplicity of the story, this is a novel that doesn't allow you to get comfortable. You have to pay close attention and it takes a while to get your rhythm as a reader. The narrative constantly shifts to memories, past conversations, childhood scenes -- and then quickly moves back to the present. But there are two strands of real-time story, too. And then Mengestu has even more tricks up his sleeve as we hurdle to the ending, and, we hope, an answer to the novel's questions.

This is also a novel about storytelling -- how memories and stories overlap and mix and become an amalgam of several different interpretations of events. Sometimes stories are idealized to hide truth. Sometimes stories are exaggerated to emphasize truth. Sometimes stories are a tool for excavating a truth that is too difficult to arrive at head on.

I know this will put some readers off this book, but it truly is a novel that requires some thought, concentration, and undivided attention. It's not a difficult read, but Mengestu is subtle. He's not slapping you in the face with what he's trying to do here. There were times I didn't give it the mental space it deserved and those times I was just looking forward to finishing it. I wish now I would've highlighted some of the beautiful and profound passages in this novel. Because they are what drew back in -- there would be a sentence or scene or a quote that would stop me in my tracks, and I'd be like "Dammit, I really should've put more into this book." It's also probably a novel that requires a second reading. But it's an ideal book club book, and I enjoyed the time I spent with it.