A Vilcek prize winner profile:
“Literature,” says Dinaw Mengestu, “has always provided me with a space to feel both intellectually and emotionally alive.” In his own fiction, he extends an invitation to his readers to do the same, “to enter personal and physical landscapes that while perhaps wholly imagined, nonetheless have a vitality and truth to them.” He raises questions of identity, and in answering them, sets his characters on personal journeys through memory and of discovery.After the jump,a Macarthur Fellow talk:
Ed Ou/The New York Times
A reflection of his own past and experiences, many of Mr. Mengestu’s characters are immigrants or the children of immigrants, often from Africa, as he is; and so an underlying theme is what it means to be American. The narrator in his most recent novel, How to Read the Air, overhears a colleague say about him: “He’s completely American…but you wouldn’t necessarily guess that from just looking at him.” Indeed, the character, Jonas Woldermarian, was born and raised in Peoria, Illinois. By making Jonas undeniably American yet somehow “other,” Mr. Mengestu reminds us that we all carry our pasts with us. For immigrants, it may be more apparent: they bear the burden of looking foreign, sounding foreign. But who has not felt the acute sting of otherness, at work, in social situations, sometimes even among one’s own family? Which is why Mr. Mengestu’s books resist categorization as “immigrant literature”; they are, simply, great literature...[continue reading]
