Dinaw Mengestu, Parisian stopover for "Someone Like Us"

Paris, a café, and a writer arriving from New York, jet-lagged and still feeling the effects of jet lag. Dinaw Mengestu, an American novelist born in Addis Ababa and who came to the United States as a child, is in the capital for the French publication of his fourth novel, "Someone Like Us".

The interview flows smoothly between English and solid French, learned on the ground: Mengestu lived here from 2007 to 2012 with his French wife. This detail is far from insignificant, as his work walks a fine line between countries, languages, and identities, with its way of recounting exile without embellishing it with grand pronouncements.

Three days, one death, and silences that cling to the skin.

In "Someone Like Us," the story begins abruptly. Mamush, living in Paris with his wife and young child, learns of the death of Samuel, "perhaps his father." He was supposed to return to the United States alone at the end of the year, but he misses his flight and arrives too late: Samuel is already dead. The novel focuses on three days and unfolds as an internal confrontation, a family investigation where progress is tentative, navigating between contradictory memories and truths that dare not be confronted. Mengestu deliberately plays with the fluidity between time periods and places, between reality, imagination, and lies, as if memory refuses to obey and the reader, too, must accept walking without a map.

What is striking is the weight of what remains unsaid. Suicide, difficult to name in the Ethiopian community depicted, runs like a watermark through the narrative, as do mental health and addiction, subjects rarely raised aloud by the characters. Mengestu, already known in France for "The Beautiful Things That Heaven Bears" and "How to Read the Air," thus continues his exploration of fragmented transmission and migrant identities, at a time when transnational narratives between East Africa and the United States are finding renewed resonance. This persistent impression remains, once the book is closed: in some families, history is passed down like a letter never sent, and silence often speaks volumes.