Zeitoun

This is the third Eggers book I've read and they've all been really readable. I like reading them.

The others were Heartbreaking Work and What is the What, and all of them have been about things that are true.

Zeitoun is fuckin' horrifying. It's about a Syrian emigrant to the US who chooses to stay in New Orleans during Katrina due to reasons that make perfect sense. He's equipped to stay, he has properties to watch out for, he's resourceful: he's actually the right guy to stay. He's an asset to the post-Katrina mess. And then he's arrested for no reason and you really understand what it's like to be trapped in a broken system. It's eloquently put and solidly researched: this is what really happened, in our country, to one of our people show more who was helping. It's as powerful an attack on what can go wrong in a country you thought had its shit together as I've seen, and - I want to really emphasize this - it's absolutely true. Eggers checked his sources; there aren't any events in this book that didn't take place.

But Zeitoun the character turns out not to be Zeitoun now. And it's hard for me to deal with that. Was he not a violent man before? All my experience tells me that domestic abuse doesn't come from nowhere; this behavior probably existed before. (His ex-wife, Kathy, has given conflicting reports.) I could be wrong! Zeitoun's experience post-Katrina may have been so traumatic that it tilted him. I just...don't know.

Eggers as a writer has a slippery relationship with truth. Heartbreaking Work deals extensively with the difference between recollection and reality. What is the What is billed as a fictionalized autobiography; Eggers and Valentino Achak Deng collaborated on a version of the latter's life. And here with Zeitoun we have a story where all the facts are true, but the characters may be false.

I wonder whether he turned Zeitoun into his story, or whether the story changed Zeitoun. One way or another, this novel turns into a metafictional comment on the conflict between the story we write and the story we want told.

Eggers has set out to be a novelist who writes nonfiction. This story is great, but it got away from him. I'm not sure if that's okay. show less

This is an astonishing book. U. S. government agencies, acting upon bizarre studies on what terrorists "might do" before, during and after a natural catastrophe, themselves became the terrorist organization committing, in their frenzy, violations of human rights with impunity. This is the story of just one remarkable family in New Orleans whose acts of basic human kindness in the face of every conceivable obstacle from both hurricane Katrina and from the organized terror of FEMA and the Department of Homeland Security, should be an example to all of us.

A man in a second-hand canoe, gliding through the streets of New Orleans. The levees have collapsed and the Crescent City is drowning. The man is Abdulrahman Zeitoun. A Syrian Muslim. He owns his own prosperous business, a painting and contracting outfit and he is happily married, with three children. Katrina abruptly and cruelly changes everything. Here is a passage:

“ Zeitoun woke with the sun and crawled out of his tent. The day was bright, and as far as he could see in any direction the city was underwater. Though every resident of New Orleans imagines great floods, knows that such a thing is possible in a city surrounded by water and ill-conceived levees, the sight, in the light of day, was beyond anything he imagined. He could show more only think of Judgment Day, of Noah and forty days of rain. And yet it was so quiet, so still. Nothing moved.”

Dave Eggers has told an amazing story of one family’s survival, against both the brutal force of nature and a heartless bureaucratic system. Unforgettable and highly recommended! show less

Rating: 5* of five

The Publisher Says: When Hurricane Katrina struck New Orleans, Abdulrahman Zeitoun, a prosperous Syrian-American and father of four, chose to stay through the storm to protect his house and contracting business. In the days after the storm, he traveled the flooded streets in a secondhand canoe, passing on supplies and helping those he could. A week later, on September 6, 2005, Zeitoun abruptly disappeared.

Eggers’s riveting nonfiction book, three years in the making, explores Zeitoun’s roots in Syria, his marriage to Kathy — an American who converted to Islam — and their children, and the surreal atmosphere (in New Orleans and the United States generally) in which what happened to Abdulrahman Zeitoun was show more possible. Like What Is the What, Zeitoun was written in close collaboration with its subjects and involved vast research — in this case, in the United States, Spain, and Syria.

My Review: Okay. I herewith open my piehole for the crow to be inserted. I have said nasty, judgmental things about Eggers's writings, and I meant each and every one of them. I still do.

But this book is excellent, and this book is Eggers's, so it is obvious that the old adage about a stopped clock being right twice a day applies to writers and writing as well.

It's a direct, elegantly simple telling of the nightmare side of the American Dream. It's powerfully focused, unlike every other one of Eggers's overpraised books that I've read, and it's superbly structured, with no room for improvement in pacing and character development that I can find.

I don't believe I'm typing these things, someone reassure me that this is *me*! Every criticism I've leveled at this guy's previous writing is out the window! Will they turn off the gravity next?

But truth is truth, and honesty compels me to say: I haven't enjoyed a book this much in ages. Well, enjoyed is a strange term to use for the true and factual, and awful, story of a decent, honorable man made the butt of scoiety's opprobrium for no reason other than his religion and origins. But the book is deeply enjoyable, because at every turn, Zeitoun's decency and honor and integrity shine through. That alone makes the book worth buying and reading. Add to that the fact that, rare in this world failed of kindness, Zeitoun summons the best and the most positive people to him in his desperate hours.

I am disappointed that Twilight *shudder* and The Life of Pi *retch*, vastly inferior books to this one, and to name but two of the many, many books this applies to, have more copies on the site.

Please...do your part to change this, and go buy a copy. Then read it. It will, contrary to any expectation you might have, leave you uplifted and happier for having read a book about Hurricane Katrina and an Arab immigrant. Very strongly recommended.

And, thanks to my friend Terri for making me read this...even sending me a copy...one it will be extremely hard to release back into the bookosphere. That I will *have* to buy a replacement is a small economic price to pay.

********Addendum in 2013: Yes indeed, Zeitoun has been arrested and accused of crimes recently, and many have taken this as an invalidation of his post-Katrina experiences. Apparently no thought is given to what these experiences of injustice in The Home of The Free might be expected to do to a man is irrelevant to those who hold this opinion. That's just bad, sloppy thinking. What happened to Zeitoun after Katrina is still real, and his story of that time is still one of a horrifying miscarriage of justice using "race" as a flimsy, transparent attempt at justification. show less

My first experience with Dave Eggers was when I read his memoir, A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius. (How could I resist that title?) Although I remember liking the book, my main memory is of footnotes. Lots of footnotes. Cleverly done and witty footnotes. But still … I mainly remember the footnotes. It read and felt like the memoir of very smart young writer, but it also felt a bit “show offy” in a similar way to Jonathan Safran Foer’s Everything Is Illuminated. I’d not read any more Eggers books since, but I’ve come across him from time to time in anthologies or short stories. In fact, it was his essay in the anthology State by State that led me to this book. As part of my Take Another Chance Challenge, I had to show more read an anthology, pick a favorite selection from it, and read another work by that writer. After reading Egger’s very amusing essay on his home state of Illinois, I decided to pick him.

I bought Zeitoun knowing nothing about it. All I knew was that it was by Dave Eggers, and the cover was intriguing. Who was this guy in the boat? Where was he? What was he doing? What did Zeitoun mean? The book I found within was not what I expected from Eggers. What I found was a measured, thought-provoking accounting of one family’s experiences before, during and after Hurricane Katrina.

Zeitoun turns out to be Abdulrahman Zeitoun, a Syrian-born painting contractor who has run a successful business in New Orleans for years. Married to his wife Kathy, Zeitoun works hard raising his children and running his business. When the family first hears rumblings about a big storm moving toward New Orleans, Zeitoun never once considers leaving. His home and his business are there, and he won’t leave it to be ravaged by a hurricane. Besides, he is too busy helping clients board up their homes for the impending storm. Concerned about the increasingly dire weather reports, Kathy takes the children and evacuates New Orleans—unwilling to leave Zeitoun but knowing he cannot be convinced to leave.

When Katrina arrives, Zeitoun is thankful he stayed behind once the flooding takes over the first floor of his home. Working frantically to salvage as much of the family’s possessions as possible, Zeitoun seeks shelter on the second floor of his home, eventually being forced to sleep on the roof in a tent. Equipped with a canoe, Zeitoun ventures out in the immediate aftermath of the storm and is stunned by what he sees—a city underwater that seems eerily quiet and deserted. But bit by bit, Zeitoun finds others who stayed behind and begins to help as much as possible. As he works helping those in need—including an elderly woman trapped in her home and neighborhood dogs who have been left behind by their owners—Zeitoun feels a sense of purpose and accomplishment he’s never felt before. Galvanized by his new purpose, Zeitoun feels energized and fully alive. When he finally gets in touch with Kathy, he tells her that he is well, checking on their rental properties, and doing what he can to help. He tells Kathy that it will be some time before she and the children can return to New Orleans so she needs to find a place to live and enroll the children in school. They agree to talk on the phone each day at a certain time and make decisions about what steps to take next.

But one day, Zeitoun doesn’t call, and Kathy is plunged into worry. The news coming out of New Orleans is increasingly worrisome, and Kathy feels nervous about Zeitoun’s lack of contact. Plagued by anxiety, Kathy does everything she can think of to find out what happened to Zeitoun. Days go by without word, but then Kathy finally gets some news. What she learns is shocking and plunges her into an uphill battle to save her husband.

If I’m being vague and leaving you with a cliffhanger, it is because I think you should read this book. Learning what Zeitoun experiences in the aftermath of Katrina was shocking, outrageous and, sadly, utterly believable. Eggers makes the brilliant decision to let Zeitoun’s story speak for itself. The story doesn’t need to be embellished or embroidered with hyperbole to raise your hackles and get your blood pumping. We’ve all heard about the horrors and injustices that happened during and after Katrina, but hearing Zeitoun’s first-hand experience makes it come alive and feel very personal. And very very wrong.

Although Eggers tells this non-fiction story in narrative form, he is careful to relate things as simply and straightforwardly as possible. I’m sure it is a structure that has been criticized as blurring the line between fact and fiction, but I think Eggers manages to pull off a rather tricky balancing act. At the end, Eggers provides a list of documentation and methodology for the writing of the book and emphasizes that everything is based on the Zeitouns’ recollections, extensive interviews, and research.

Although I thought Eggers presented Zeitoun’s incendiary story in a way that lets the facts speak for themselves, I’m sure many people won’t like to hear what happens to him. Zeitoun’s story is very disturbing, yet it is a story that needs to be told. I’m glad I read this book and learned more about this recent chapter in U.S. history. Although the book is often disturbing, shocking and upsetting, it is also inspirational and uplifting. It is a book you won’t soon forget. show less

Though I enjoyed Dave Eggers' What is the What?, I was never entirely comfortable with the genre, which, like Zeitoun, takes the form of a non-fiction novel. In that first work, I was not always sure who was speaking, Eggers or the protagonist, Achak, and I was perpetually unclear about how much was fact and how much was the fictional glue required to hold it together. The approach did serve the storytelling: it was fascinating and very readable.

With Zeitoun, I was initially comfortable with this same tension, and it was not long before I was totally buying Eggers' thesis about this quintessentially American man, hardworking and dedicated deeply to his religion, his family, his property, and his enterprise, who ultimately encounters a show more darker America, where one's treatment is less a function of guilt or innocence, and more about one's name, ethnicity, and religion.

At that point in my reading, I did some supplementary research about Hurricane Katrina, and the Zeitouns themselves, and discovered what any quick internet search will reveal, that after Katrina, Abdulrahman and Kathy Zeitoun's relationship descended into acrimony, domestic abuse, and eventually divorce and violated restraining orders. In the book their relationship comes across as a much tried, but resilient pillar of strength in the midst of the post-Katrina failure of American society and institutions. Although Kathy Zeitoun has indicated that Eggers did describe their marriage pretty much as it was during that brief window covered by the book, she has since said that she was abused by her husband prior to the events depicted.

This supplmentary information, in and of itself, did not discredit the Katrina-related events of Zeitoun, but once I was aware of it, how could I possibly have continued to empathize with Abdulrahman as a victim? The entire edifice of the book became as leaky as a Louisiana levee, and my focus inevitably moved from the story itself to the limitations of how the story was told. Would a more traditional journalistic treatment have uncovered the details that Zeitoun missed? Does the necessity of forcing a fictionalized narration on real events and people necessarily result in an oversimplified interpretation? Does it force the subjects to reveal only what will support that interpretation? And if the published story widely misses the mark, what is the impact on those who were misrepresented or who misrepresented themselves?

In considering these questions, I thought of the brilliant Behind the Beautiful Forevers, for which Katherine Boo spent three years with her subjects. Her book demonstrates that the non-fiction novel can succeed in incorporating many viewpoints and complexities. Handled with enough artistry, effort, and care, this genre is more than just a vehicle for immersing the reader in other, real people's lives, it can also provide a way to successfully capture something resembling the tangled intricacy of the human situation. Who knows how or why Zeitoun failed? In that moment of extraordinary upheaval when it was written, likely all involved acted to some degree in good faith. It may have just proven too fraught a challenge for the time and resources that were brought to the task. show less

A devastating natural disaster, followed by the iron heel of the U.S. police state. This story of a family's experience of Hurricane Katrina and its aftermath has a somewhat happy ending but trauma remains. Although slow at times, it is still a good story well told.