Harsh

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Someone Like Us

by Dinaw Mengestu

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Harsh said:

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" This book was slippery and difficult. Not to say it isn't readable - I would breeze through entire sections and come to a stop realising that the details didn't make sense given what I knew (or thought I knew). There are multiple flashbacks intersper This book was slippery and difficult. Not to say it isn't readable - I would breeze through entire sections and come to a stop realising that the details didn't make sense given what I knew (or thought I knew). There are multiple flashbacks interspersed with one another and a chapter plunges you into right into the action so that you have to scramble for context on where you are. The narrator's tendency for self-deception and self-alienation gives the scenes a slight detachment from reality. Trust the process and it does resonate at the end.

It's a beautiful book about (or one of the things it's about is) grief and the disorganisation of remembering a person. Sorting through the lies that are told and repeated in a relationship, examining the meanings of the ones that you both recognise as lies but never acknowledge. Traversing in your mind the things that had to be unsaid and unknown. It's about loving and remembering someone who was unhappy.

I will need to think about the immigrant experience in this book... The lives that the characters experience in the countries they move to is cruel, indifferent and racist. This is a weight on Mamush and Samuel, but the heart of the book is Mamush trying to process the effects of this burden on the people he loves. Samuel has uprooted his life and Mamush seems unrooted, yet he has some stability remarked upon by Samuel - Samuel has experienced America vividly, but there's no question of him assimilating. Mamush finds it easier to access a sense of place and identity through a fictional alter ego than in his own life, but country doesn't factor into his identity struggle prominently like it does Samuel. He is not torn, he's never known different.

Samuel's pain has to be justified. It can't be laid bare. Mamush's confusion cannot be expressed. They both have an comprehension of each other's struggles and they both suffer similarly, but the communication is broken with no path to repair. And towards the end Mamush thinks that they can never understand each other. Mamush is grieving this relationship that was always broken, and in Samuel's death he can open up the dialogue in ways that he knows how, play the game of what would you say if you were here. ...more "

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— Feb 22, 2025 01:25AM

Feb 22, 2025 01:25AM · see review