Novelists Junot Diaz and Dinaw Mengestu were among the 23 fellows who have won a $500,000 “genius grant” from the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation this year.
In a crazy twist of fate, both are Riverhead Books novelists. Other writers on the list were journalist and author David Finkel and historian Dylan C. Penningroth. The AP has the complete list at this link.
Here’s more about the awards, from the Foundation: “The recipients learned, through a phone call out of the blue from the Foundation, that they will each receive $500,000 in no-strings-attached support over the next five years. MacArthur Fellowships come without stipulations or reporting requirements and offer Fellows unprecedented freedom and opportunity to reflect, create, and explore. The unusual level of independence afforded to Fellows underscores the spirit of freedom intrinsic to creative endeavors. The work of MacArthur Fellows knows neither boundaries nor the constraints of age, place, and endeavor.”
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The Beautiful Things That Heaven Bears by Dinaw Mengestu
Dinaw Mengestu's 2007 debut novel, The Beautiful Things That Heaven Bears gives a thoughtful yet, melancholic look at the isolated life of an Ethiopian immigrant running a fledgling neighborhood grocery in D.C.
Sepha Stephanos fled Ethiopia nearly twenty years prior to escape the Ethiopian revolution. He struggles with his ceaseless desire to return to his home country and his indifferent existence in America. His rundown store also serves as meeting place for him and two fellow African immigrants who pass the time naming coups and dictators of the various African nations. Things appear to be on an upswing as his neighborhood is in the beginnings of gentrification. The first home to be renovated, which he describes as "a beautiful, tragic wreck of a building," is purchased by Judith, a white woman who's an academic and has a biracial 11 year old daughter. Sepha and Judith engage in this awkward flirtation while he forms a bond with her daughter as they read Dostoevsky in his store. Even his budding friendship with Judith's daughter falls into a formulaic routine. Sepha's observations of the lunchtime crowd in and around his neighborhood make their daily routine appear as monotonous as his.
His fellow immigrant friends have similarly vacant existences. One is stuck waiting tables as they all once did in the same hotel all those years later and the other has "made it" as a well paid engineer but even he cannot let go of his past and works constantly to ignore his present. None of them are really present in their current lives in America. Mengestu often uses the word "beautiful" to describe things that are not necessarily so as Sepha does to appease his friend about a newly acquired used Saab which is anything but beautiful. To the friend, it was his; he earned the money to buy it and that made it beautiful. As the title suggests, which comes from a line in Dante's Inferno, Sepha will eventually emerge from his own hell and discover the beautiful things that heaven bears. While it has spots that lull, there are also spots that are moving and spots that are heartbreaking. Mengestu's novel is very quiet and subtle in its approach and I actually enjoyed that. This was a strong debut from a skillful writer. I'm sure that he's a voice for my generation.
Original review here
I have been struggling to find a simple way to recount the deeply quiet, deeply moving nature of Dinaw Mengestu's second novel,
How to Read the Air, a novel that feels so searching, so dispelled that it is difficult to remember that it is not, in fact, memoir.
Air is the story of a young man so scarred by the anguish, anger, and finally submerged violence of his parents—Ethiopian immigrants who did not grow up to become themselves in this land of opportunity—that he lives at terrible remove from himself. Jonas is the name of this unlucky couple's son, and as the novel opens he is newly in love with a lawyer, Angela, whom he will soon marry. In short order (and with Angela's help), Jonas gets a job teaching English at a New York City academy. In similarly short order, the two begin to carve out psychic and spatial distances within their 500 sf basement apartment. There are lies that they do and do not tell one another. There are games played and never won. Jonas is a man who won't be provoked, and often that looks like indifference to Angela, who is desperate to know that she is truly loved. That she is safe inside that love.
Don't all relationships hinge on conversation, of some sort? Don't we expect each other to answer questions, to reflect back, to find some center of perceived truth? Is civility just as cruel as violence, when the civility feels empty, fraudulent?
Jonas is not a bad man. Indeed, he is a character with whom readers can easily empathize, and that is because Mengestu makes us privy to the now and the then of the thoughts in his protagonist's head. We see him sifting his parents' past, looking for clues. We see him leaning on fabrications, assumptions, and possibilities to give himself a sense of place, or having once been placed, inside the tether of a home. If he is able to construct the story of his psychic inheritance for his students, he is not able to deliver that story to his wife, and she requires such binding in. If he is able to know what love is, what it should be, he is unable to act on what he knows:
In our rush to presumably better ourselves we had both missed what had otherwise always been obvious—that it often didn't take much more than careful consideration of each other's needs to secure a degree of happiness.
There is an impeccable quality to Mengestu's prose—a calm, collected rise to despair and violence. He puts a smooth-faced mirror to life—giving us much that we don't know (the plight, let's say, of Ethiopian immigrants) and giving us so much that we can at times know all too well.
It sounds like a haunting book, Beth.