I inhaled this little melancholic novella by Dinaw Mengestu in two days. Echoes of other immigrant stories, yet all its own. Read/heard about it in three different places within as many days...you know how that comes to "mean something".
Here's a snippet of a conversation between two African immigrants who escaped violent coups in their separate homelands to come to the US with the naive belief in that elusive American Dream.
Everything is beautiful to you.
Not everything.
But damn close.
You just have to have the right perspective.
Which is what?
Indifference. You have to know that none of this is going to last. And then you have to not care.
And then the world becomes beautiful?
No. It becomes ridiculous. Which is close enough for me.
It is filled with these embedded little gems that make you stop and want to underline them. But I never do.
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