Juxtaposing a placid life in one Midwestern college town against the chaos of post-colonial Uganda, MacArthur Fellow Dinaw Mengestu (The Beautiful Things That Heaven Bears) places his new novel, All Our Names, at the crossroads where American excess and comfort clash with the violence and backbiting of revolutionary Africa. The story centers on Isaac, a rebel intent on overthrowing Uganda's corrupt president. We follow him through the naive eyes of the young Ethiopian narrator who comes to Uganda with 13 names, handed down from previous generations. "I was the first in our village to have thirteen names," he explains. Isaac just calls him Daniel.
Daniel dreams of a university life, but Isaac's charismatic influence draws him into the fight. His only means of escape is a falsified Kenyan passport in Isaac's name. Now living in the United States under a false identity, he's taken under the wing of a second narrator: Helen, a young white social worker hardened with the hopelessness of her vocation. In the disillusioned young man, she finds her humanitarian impulses renewed--and her romantic impulses awakened.
With neatly drawn parallels, Mengestu contrasts the seemingly benign obstacles facing a poor black immigrant in the U.S. with the seemingly corrupt obstacles facing him in Africa. His former life at odds with the life they could build together, they learn the hard lesson that the past is not easy to undo. Helen describes this wisdom: "Loving someone and feeling loved in return was the best exercise for the heart, the strength training needed to do more than simply make it through life." --Bruce Jacobs, founding partner, Watermark Books & Cafe, Wichita, Kan.