What I like most about this book is how concerned it is with stories as such, with lies and fictions. Jonas Woldemariam has a degree in English and a foreign-sounding last name: it’s the name, he thinks, that got him a full-time job as a receptionist/factotum at a refugee resettlement center after a string of temp jobs, but eventually his job description broadens: it turns out that Jonas is good at polishing (read: rewriting, with embellishment) the personal statements of the asylum-seekers who are the center’s clients. He makes their cases more compelling, to give the lawyers who will be taking their cases more to work with, but sometimes in the process the stories jump wildly into fiction: maybe for one family he’ll just expand a statement like “they came for us at night” to something more dramatic, but for another family, who flew business class from their home country to Dubai, he’ll invent greater hardships, nights held hostage, violence. But it’s not just the refugee-seekers whose stories he invents: Jonas also fills in the blanks in his own family’s past, inventing the details of his father’s flight from Ethiopia to Sudan to Italy to London, and the details of his parents’ not-quite-honeymoon, a trip they set out to take from Peoria to Nashville after being reunited after three years apart. And it’s not just Jonas who’s doing the inventing: his wife, Angela (they meet at work, where they’re the only black employees or volunteers) is always talking about how her father left her family, but it’s a different story every time, and together the two of them invent stories about their own pasts, shared or separate—imagining Jonas having been on the soccer team in high school, imagining Angela having been there to watch his games from the bleachers. There are less innocent fictions, too, and stories that get their teller into trouble, but there’s the sense of the need for narrative, the need for the past to explain the present, even in an oblique sort of way, even if the stories about the past aren’t the truth of what happened.
The other thing I think this book captures really well is the rush of intensity early in a relationship, spending hours and hours with a new person, and the ridiculous/excellent optimism and good-humor of a new partnership, like:
“I’m going to read everything you have,” she said to me one afternoon. “Even the stupid books you don’t want to tell me about.”
“And I’m going to do the same,” I said. I stood up and pulled from the shelf volume one of U.S. Constitutional Law. Angela, not to be outdone, went to the closet and pulled from the top shelf a thick hardbound copy of a thesaurus that had been a college graduation gift from my mother.
“I’ve heard it’s really good,” she said, “and by good I mean: exceptional, superb, outstanding, marvelous, wonderful, first-rate, first-class, sterling.” (34-35)
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