Dinaw Mengestu: on How to Read the Air

Dinaw Mengestu won the Guardian First Book Award in 2008 for his fractured, delicate book, Children of the Revolution.

Two years later (the book actually came out on New Year's Eve eve) he returns with his second novel, a triumphant multi-generational layered tale about the impact of familial patterns on their children, and the journeys we undertake into the past to reconcile ourselves with the present. It's a vulnerable, quiet and brilliant book.

We spoke to Dinaw about the book and his process of writing it.

> Tell us about How to Read the Air. What was the inspiration behind writing it?

The initial idea for the story began shortly after I returned to Ethiopia for the first time in 25 years. As soon as I came back to America I felt compelled to drive to Peoria, Illinois where my family first settled. I was fascinated by the contrast in landscape and culture between these two seemingly disparate parts of the world, and how someone like my mother or father could try and reconcile that difference. At the same time I’ve always held my own affection for middle America, for its culture and landscape and I knew at some point I would try and bring that into my writing.

> How much of your own family life and upbringing enforced the story?

The only parts of my own life and the life of my family that are directly related to the story are those centered around a young, married couple arriving in the Midwest after fleeing Ethiopia. My parents lived a drastically different life from the characters in the novel, and my own life in New York and Paris has been radically different from that of the narrator’s. One of the joys of being a novelist is that you can steal details from your own life and then imagine entirely different circumstances that speak to what you hope to be a greater truth through your characters.

> The story takes place along dual timelines. How did you go about writing it?

Writing from different points in time that are nonetheless intimately linked felt fairly organic and inevitable from the beginning. I knew that there was a family history being told from the point of a view of a narrator trying to understand how that past determined his own life. The story began to unfold from there and after a certain stage began to oscillate between past and present. The initial version, of course, was deeply flawed. It took more than a year of careful rewriting and reorganising in order to make sure the two narratives moved back and forth naturally.

> What was your favourite book of 2010?

Right now I would have to say Jennifer Egan’s A Visit From the Goon Squad. It’s a brilliant, beautiful novel.

> What is the greatest piece of writing advice you’ve ever been given?

The best is often the simplest, especially when it comes to writing. A professor in college told me to go off and write. Whether or not I succeeded was irrelevant at that point. I had to write first.

> The book deals quietly and emotively with big themes, from domestic violence to civil war – what was your stylistic intention with this?

I wanted to write from as many points of view as possible. I wanted to make a compelling argument for fiction, narrative, the imagination, and why we tell stories. I wanted to say this isn’t an immigrant story or an African story, but a novel about people who are lost and searching.

> What book made you sit up and think, Damn, I want to be a writer?

Every good book I read reminds me of that. If I can’t write I read, and it is always and only in books that I’m reminded of the fact that language is remarkable and at times beautiful and that nothing makes me feel like I understand my place in this world as much as a good book.

> If you went back and reread all your early stories and works, what advice would you give your younger self?

It would be the same advice I would give myself now: try harder. Write and rewrite until what you have feels inevitable.

> What music were you listening to, writing the book?

In this case I worked almost exclusively in silence — often late at night so the only sound I could hear was a clock ticking.

> Which author would you most like to be compared to?

I wouldn’t mind Saul Bellow.