This month, we’re reading novels that examine how cultures and identities can collide, whether in Washington, D.C.’s modern-day Ethiopian American community or the mountains of pre-World War I Prussia.
Someone Like Us
Dinaw Mengestu (Knopf, 272 pp., $28, July 2024)
Dinaw Mengestu’s latest novel, Someone Like Us, follows a well-trodden narrative framework: A trip home for the holidays goes awry. Protagonist Mamush, an Ethiopian American journalist based in Paris, visits his mother in the “sprawling empire of the D.C. suburbs,” only to discover that Samuel, a father-cum-uncle figure, has died unexpectedly by suicide.
From there, the story shape-shifts to become anything but typical.
On the surface, the plot follows Mamush’s attempts to understand who exactly Samuel was—and why he took his own life. But Mamush is an unreliable narrator and, as he bounces between memories, internal dialogues, and his imagination, it is unclear which anecdotes are real and which ones he concocts on the spot, perhaps in an attempt to come to terms with Samuel’s checkered past.
What the reader does glean is this: Mamush’s mother and Samuel were friends in Ethiopia, and Samuel is most likely Mamush’s biological father, although he later married another woman. In the D.C. area, where the four of them settled, Samuel worked as an ambitious taxi driver, eager to make it in America. But he battles alcoholism and drug addiction, finding his way to a halfway house before his untimely death. Samuel also has a criminal history, though the details are unclear.
In the process of revealing these various fragments, Mengestu—who is himself Ethiopian American—provides jarring reflections on immigration, Black African identity, addiction, mental illness, and family, among other charged topics.
“I didn’t live in the world of happy and unhappy childhoods, happy and unhappy families,” Mamush explains, “we did what we had to do and never considered other options.” In this context, Samuel’s illness is shrouded in shame and denial. “In the diaspora, just like in Ethiopia,” Mamush recalls Samuel telling him, “there were no high school dropouts of failing children, no depression or mental illness, no drug addicts or alcoholics.”
There is also a great deal of meta-commentary about journalism. Mengestu is disillusioned by the profession in part because editors often pigeonhole him into covering “poor immigrants struggling in America” and won’t consider “a comedy or love story” unless “there’s at least a little suffering.”
The most unusual feature of the book is the addition of photos, which are occasionally interspersed throughout the text. In the narrative, they are presented as pictures that Mamush’s French wife, a photographer, texts him. Mengestu’s wife is also French; together with the other parallels between Mengestu and Mamush, the photos indicate that at least some of the story is semi-autobiographical.
While many of the novel’s themes are universal, its location is important. The D.C. region is home to the largest Ethiopian community outside of Africa. Samuel’s taxi trips take him from Logan Circle to Anacostia to “a tightly coiled postwar development a few miles from the Pentagon,” painting a portrait of a vulnerable city that seems very far from the powerful institutions that usually define it.—Allison Meakem
The Empusium: A Health Resort Horror Story
Olga Tokarczuk (Riverhead Books, 320 pp., $30, September 2024)
On the eve of the Great War, a naive young engineer arrives at a remote sanitorium in the mountains, where he confronts competing ideological visions of the world over impassioned dinner discussions on topics ranging from nationalism to secularism. This is the premise of Thomas Mann’s 1924 masterpiece, The Magic Mountain––and now, the work of another Nobelist: Olga Tokarczuk’s The Empusium, published in Polish in 2022 and recently translated into English by Antonia Lloyd-Jones.
Tokarczuk, in her own words, has written a “conscious, carefully thought-out reference to [Mann’s] work,” a book she admires greatly. Those are large shoes to fill, but her gothic retelling of the novel has a clear point: “Nowadays when we read many classic works of literature, we are struck by the absence of women, or simply by their misogyny,” she said in a recent interview. “The Magic Mountain is an example of one of these great books without women, written in its time and with the characteristics of that time,” and Tokarczuk thinks it’s important to return to—and do a “bit of sparring” with—those texts.
For much of the novel, Tokarczuk hews fairly closely to Mann’s blueprint. Her central character, Mieczysław Wojnicz, is Polish, rather than German, and the resort is nestled in the Silesian mountain town of Görbersdorf in modern-day Poland, rather than Davos in the Swiss Alps. But like Mann’s protagonist, Wojnicz passes his days in a kind of stupor, listening to long didactic debates between other patients, mainly a Catholic traditionalist and a socialist-humanist.
Like its predecessor, The Empusium evokes a bygone Europe. The characters are often chattering away in languages and dialects their acquaintances don’t understand, before returning to the lingua franca of “schoolboy German.” Wojnicz, reminiscing about his childhood, recalls that his class in Lwòw (now the Ukrainian city of Lviv) had Polish, Jewish, Ukrainian, Austrian, Romanian, Hungarian, and Transylvanian students. One character tells Wojnicz: “My father was an Austrian official, but he was born in Jassy. My mother was from Bukovina, but she was Austrian. Though what does that mean, when her parents had estates in Hungary and felt themselves to be Hungarian. And in my turn I am…it’s hard to say. In terms of language, I think in German and Romanian. And in French, of course, like every European.”
If there’s something romantic about this cosmopolitan snapshot of the continent before it was rent apart by two world wars, the profound misogyny that pervades these conversations swiftly dispels such a notion. As Wojnicz notices, “every discussion, whether about democracy, the fifth dimension, the role of religion, socialism, Europe, or modern art, eventually led to women.” The characters’ contempt for women is magnified and, unlike much of the novel, feels strangely atemporal. (As Tokarczuk relays in her author’s note, male writers from Augustine of Hippo to Jack Kerouac served as inspiration for these views.) This adds to The Empusium’s undercurrent of unease, fed by haunting local folktales and a freely flowing hallucinogenic liqueur. These unwieldy, out-of-place elements also render Tokarczuk’s ambitious tale her own, driving the plot to its gruesome conclusion.—Chloe Hadavas
November Releases, in Brief
In Japanese literary giant Haruki Murakami’s The City and Its Uncertain Walls, translated by Philip Gabriel, a middle-aged man ventures into another world in search of a long lost love. Irish oncologist-cum-novelist Austin Duffy’s Cross offers a portrait of an embattled Northern Irish border town in the final summer of the Troubles. A onetime prima ballerina revisits the alluring world of Russian ballet in Juhea Kim’s City of Night Birds. Yang Shuang-zi’s 2020 bestseller Taiwan Travelogue, which explores lost histories of 1930s Taiwan, is translated into English by Lin King. A private investigator finds himself at the heart of a global criminal scheme after fleeing New York for Cali, Colombia, in Sergio De La Pava’s Every Arc Bends Its Radian.
Latvian-born American writer Michael Idov makes his mark on 21st-century spy fiction in the globe-trotting The Collaborators. In German author Esther Kinsky’s homage to cinema, Seeing Further, translated by Caroline Schmidt, a woman attempts to restore a dilapidated movie theater in rural Hungary. Set My Heart on Fire, the late writer Izumi Suzuki’s first novel to be translated into English, dives into 1970s Tokyo’s underground club scene. David Peace’s Munichs revisits the 1958 Munich air disaster, one of the greatest tragedies in sports history. And Julian Zabalbeascoa’s debut novel, What We Tried to Bury Grows Here, navigates the horrors of the Spanish Civil War.—CH
