All Our Names (2014) by Dinaw Mengestu is a book about loneliness, isolation, and dislocation. It tries to be a love story, but the strength of the book lies in the other stuff.
The novel unfolds in two parallel parts: one is set in Uganda, sometime in the late 1960s/early 1970s and the second in the USA, perhaps in the 1980s. The chapters alternate in point of view, between Helen, a white, Midwestern social worker, and (not) Isaac.
The latter is the more complicated story to tell: our narrator migrated to Uganda, likely from southern Ethiopia, as a young man and there was radicalized and fell in love with another young student, whose name was Isaac. The two young men are swept into a revolutionary resistance to the current government, Isaac moreso than the narrator, an arc that culminates in Isaac giving the narrator his identity papers, including a visa for America. Which is where he meets Helen. The two of them fall in love and struggle with the inherent difficulties of everyday, systemic, and targeted racism.
The structure dictates a constant back-and-forth in time, as Helen’s chapters are all in the later timeline, while Isaac’s progress from the time in Uganda forward.
Mengestu’s power is an ability to convey heartbreak, the longing for identity and companionship and understanding that is at the center of (not) Isaac’s life. There is a poignancy to the writing, an understanding that it is profoundly unlikely that things end well, but there can still be moments of joy and pleasure along the way. It’s not a book of large revelations, and if you have even a passing familiarity with the history of the two time periods involved, there will be little new on display.
But the characters will stay with you: Helen is drawn warmly and sympathetically, and the mysteries of (not) Isaac represent a great accomplishment, a protagonist that is constantly obscured by his own past, but remains emotionally clear in the reader’s mind.
#WhatIWishICouldDo
The relationship with Isaac is stunning. I don’t remember if there is a sexual component that is revealed, but it doesn’t really matter: it is tender, respectful, and passionate in its idealism. He captures a certain youthful abandon, and then manages to make the older (not) Isaac both continuous with the younger, but also wiser, more cautious.
Aging a character is difficult, and Mengestu does it very well.