The J - List: August 2010

Friday, August 27, 2010

The Whitest Boy Alive - Keep A Secret

An Honest Exit by Dinaw Mengestu

A very interesting piece. I've been meaning to put it up for a while. I felt as if it did something very interesting with the idea of a character. The story revolves around this woman (or honestly I thought it did when I originally read it. But after hearing that Dinaw Mengetsu was in fact a man, I can't remember the gender the main character. I do pride myself on my thorough reading of things. Just the other day I was talking about The Great Gatsby with someone and I said: "Oh ya? Who was Mr. Wilson again?") That was a bit of a tangent. So ya, it revolves around this woman telling her Literature class the life story of her father, except she's making the entire thing up. The story makes the reader question the motives of the made-up characters within the main characters story, yet you also begin to question how the main character is coming up with this portrayal of her father. Blah blah blah, the story is sick! Here is the opening paragraph:

hirty-five years after my father left Ethiopia, he died in a room in a boarding house in Peoria, Illinois, that came with a partial view of the river. We had never spoken much during his lifetime, but, on a warm October morning in New York shortly after he died, I found myself having a conversation with him as I walked north on Amsterdam Avenue, toward the high school where for the past three years I had been teaching a course in Early American literature to privileged freshmen.