Somehow, I missed Dinaw Mengestu’s impressive literary debut – which garnered reams of ecstatic praise – so I’m a little late to this party. But after turning the last page of How To Read The Air, I can see what all the fuss was about. This is an exquisite multi-layered book, an extraordinary look at immigrant’s identity, the downward spiral of violence, the power of story-telling, and the vision of redemption. It is rich, complex, and very, very good.

His protagonist, Jonas Woldemariam, is treading water at his position at a refugee resettlement center in Manhattan. In time, he is given the job of “editing out the less credulous or unnecessary parts of some of the narratives, while at the same time pointing out places where some stories could be expanded upon or magnified for greater narrative effect.” While there, he meets his wife-to-be, Angela, an ambitious and upwardly mobile fellow African-American who craves stability, security, and the great American Dream.

Despite their mutual attraction, Angela is nearly immediately on to Jonas: “You don’t have any idea of who you are, do you, Jonas.” Jonas muses, “If I didn’t know who I really was, then I could hardly be held accountable for not facing life as she expected me to. I was innocent if there was no person behind the skin that could be charged.”

The story of Jonas and Angela is juxtaposed with one of Jonas’s parents. Jonas’s parents, Mariam and Yosef, left Ethiopia, a land of terror and uncertainty. Their marriage was defined by consistent violence, which Jonas observed over and over again. Jonas knew that his father developed a special sensitivity to “the abrupt and dramatic shift of the air that precedes any violent confrontation. Something vibrated, buzzed. If ever there was a way to narrate it, he would have described it as the tiniest particles that made up the air we breathe becoming suddenly charged and electrified with a palpable life of its own.”

Dinaw Mengestu lays out, brick by brick, the legacy of violence when overlaid with the immigrant’s experience. As Angela’s cravings for reassurance – including expensive shopping sprees – increase, Jonas becomes increasingly distant and reserved. When Jonas hears of his father’s lonely death, he begins to rewrite his own history in his new position as part-time teacher at a student academy. Soon, he falls under the spell of his own stories, reinventing narrative to make sense of his life.

He reflects, “While this part of the story wasn’t true to anything, I, or anyone I knew had ever experienced, it had an air of serendipitous salvation that struck me as being so unlikely that one had to believe it had occurred that way.”

This is a breathtaking astounding look into the retelling of truth in an effort to find oneself. It is about the price of honesty and the repetition of cause and effect. It is a book that will linger with you and get under your skin. I cannot recommend it highly enough.