Call me Zebra

Review by New York Times Review

GOD SAVE TEXAS: A Journey Into the Soul of the Lone Star State, by Lawrence Wright. (Vintage, $16.95.) Wright, a Pulitzer Prizewinning journalist and longtime resident of the state, explores Texas' foibles, ironies and contradictions with affection. Given the state's booming population and economic growth, Wright's book seems to say, America's future runs through Texas - whether the rest of the country likes it or not. HOW IT HAPPENED, by Michael Koryta. (Back Bay/Little, Brown, $16.99.) In this murder mystery, Rob Barrett, an interrogation specialist with the F.B.I., is sent to investigate a double homicide that's rattled the town of Port Hope, Me. He believes the confession by a young addict, who directs him to where she says the bodies can be found. But when the details don't seem to pan out, he's kicked off the case. UNEASY PEACE: The Great Crime Decline, the Renewal of City Life, and the Next War on Violence, by Patrick Sharkey. (Norton, $16.95.) What's the downside to falling crime rates nationwide? In Sharkey's analysis, what was done to make those rates plunge included increased incarceration rates and violent policing tactics. This book admirably connects the story of how the country became safer with why many communities are wary of the police. A LONG WAY FROM HOME, by Peter Carey. (Vintage, $16.95.) A married couple and their bachelor neighbor set out on a 10,000-mile endurance contest around Australia in the hopes of eventually opening their own auto dealership. Our reviewer, Craig Taylor, praised this shape-shifting, propulsive novel, writing: "With all its inventive momentum, all its pleasurable beats, the fast pace of the race, the scenery unfurling, the novel ends up far from where it started, in a place of historical reckoning and colonial guilt." THE MAKING OF A DREAM: How a Group of Young Undocumented Immigrants Helped Change What It Means to Be American, by Laura Wides-Muñoz. (Harper, $17.99.) WidesMuñoz chronicles the battle for immigration reform through the stories of young activists. A centerpiece of the story is the passage in 2012 of the DACA act, and how it grew out of close to two decades of grass-roots efforts and political activity. CALL ME ZEBRA, by Azareen Van der Vliet Oloomi. (Mariner, $14.99.) In this crackling novel, a bookish Iranian in exile retraces the journey she took with her father, and finds love along the way. As our reviewer, Liesl Schillinger, wrote, the author "relays Zebra's brainy, benighted struggles as a tragicomic picaresque whose fervid logic and cerebral whimsy recall the work of Bolaño and Borges."

Copyright (c) The New York Times Company [March 10, 2019]

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Review by Booklist Review

She decided to call herself Zebra as she looked at the stripes cast across her father's casket by the sun. After she and her father had wandered in exile following a harrowing escape from their homeland of Iran, where a young Zebra witnessed her mother's death, they had become the world to each other. So his passing in New York has left Zebra unmoored. Raised in a highly literary family and finding meaning more in books than in the intellectual rodents whom she was taught to believe make up most of the human population, Zebra decides to retrace her exiled wanderings as preparation for writing a manifesto that will connect the threads of all the literature she has been steeped in throughout her life. This plan, however, is interrupted by a man she meets in Barcelona, who aggravates and intrigues her at the same time. Van der Vliet Oloomi's extravagant, sometimes overwrought prose, like her obsessive heroine, will not suit everyone. But for those willing to expend the effort, Call Me Zebra offers an arresting exploration of grief alongside a powder keg of a romance.--Thoreson, Bridget Copyright 2017 Booklist

From Booklist, Copyright (c) American Library Association. Used with permission.

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Review by Publisher's Weekly Review

In Oloomi's rich and delightful novel (after Fra Keeler), 22-year-old Zebra is the last in a long line of "Autodidacts, Anarchists, Atheists" exiled from early '90s Iran. Years after her family's harrowing escape, alone in New York after the death of her father (her mother died in their flight to the Kurdish border), Zebra decides to revisit some of the places where she has lived in an effort to both retrace her family's dislocation and to compose a grand manifesto on the meaning of literature. Like Don Quixote, one of her favorite characters, Zebra's perception of the world (and herself) is not as it appears to others, and her narration crackles throughout with wit and absurdity. As she treks across Catalonian Spain, she journeys through books and love affairs and philosophical tousles with Ludo Bembo, her also-displaced Italian foil. Their pattern of romantic coupling and intellectual uncoupling repeats itself; more interesting are Zebra's other exploits-her strange and brilliant interpretations of art, her belief that her mother's soul has been reincarnated inside a cockatoo, and the field-trip group she takes on pilgrimages to famous sites of exile. This is a sharp and genuinely fun picaresque, employing humor and poignancy side-by-side to tell an original and memorable story. (Feb.) © Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.

(c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved

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Review by Library Journal Review

In Bibi Abbas Abbas Hosseini, who renames herself Zebra after her father's death, Oloomi (Fra Keeler) presents the reader with a prickly, funny, often-exasperating character whose story comes to encompass the trials and tribulations of the many exiles in our modern world. This expansive novel spans both the globe from Iran to New York City and the picaresque adventures of its title character. Young Bibi's family fled Saddam Hussein's violent regime, but while the girl and her father made their way to New York, her mother was killed during the journey. When Bibi's father dies more than ten years later, the young woman decides to undertake a "Grand Tour of Exile," retracing in reverse the route she and her father took from Iran to America. Along the way, she gathers other exiles-a group she dubs "The Pilgrims of the Void"-and meets Ludo Bembo, a young man with whom she reluctantly falls in love. Yet Zebra never abandons her first and truest love, the written word. Told by her father to "trust nobody and love nothing except literature," Zebra weaves philosophy, literary theory, and historical knowledge into her own personal "manifesto" while seeking and finding connections-both hidden and overt-between and among the world's works of literature. That this lonely, brave, fiercely intelligent young woman begins to realize she must connect to other people (not just books) makes this novel all the more poignant. Leila Buck's narration, which brings Zebra's story to life in all its complexity, is a perfect fit. -VERDICT Highly recommended. ["This fierce meditation on life and love, a tour de force by self-proclaimed literary terrorist Oloomi, is one that many will read and reread": LJ 12/17 review of the Houghton Harcourt hc.]-Wendy Galgan, St. Francis Coll., Brooklyn © Copyright 2018. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.

(c) Copyright Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.

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Review by Kirkus Book Review

A young woman struggles to make sense of the tragedy of exile, embarking on a series of pilgrimages that may destroy her chance for happiness.Bibi Abbas Abbas Hosseini, the thorny, tragicomic heroine of Van der Vliet Oloomi's (Fra Keeler, 2012, etc.) darkly funny novel, is a narrator who deliberately resists categorization. Raised in Iran during the height of the Iraq War, Bibi fled with her parents, the last survivors of a proud tribe of "Autodidacts, Anarchists, Atheists." Their journey was filled with horrorsdeath, fatigue, and hungerand it haunts her into a fractured adulthood in New York City. Now, more than a decade after fleeing Iran, with her parents both dead, Bibi seeks a new mentor, vocation, and identity. The Zebra, she muses, is "an animal striped black-and-white like a prisoner of war; an animal that rejects all binaries, that represents ink on paper"; it's a name fit for an outsider, and she takes it on. In order to honor her ancestors, Zebra decides to make a "Grand Tour of Exile" through the Old World. She returns to Barcelona, her family's last stop before arriving in the U.S., to confront the intellectual, spiritual, and moral residues of colonialism and capitalism. There she meets Ludo Bembo, an Italian philologist who both repels and intrigues her. Their love affair is tempestuous, ultimately forcing Zebra to confront the way she uses literature to both separate and connect herself to the world and to others. "I am unafraid to admit that the world we live in is violent, obtuse; that a gulf, once opened, is not easily sealed; that one does not drink from the water of death and go on living disaffected, untouched," she thinks near the end of her journey. In knotty prose, Van der Vliet Oloomi both satirizes and embraces a young intellectual's self-absorbed love for her philosophical forbears. The novel is a bombastic homage to the metacriticism of Borges, the Romantic absurdity of Cervantes, and the punk-rock autofictions of Kathy Ackerall figures who loom large in Zebra's mind. As such, it's not easy to pin down the narrative itself, which is less interested in plot than in how Zebra's interior landscape might be projected onto the world. (At times of great sadness and confusion, the storm clouds quite literally roll in.) Perhaps most astonishing is that we get to revel in the intellectual formationand emotional awakeningof a frustrating, complicated, hilarious, and, at times, deliberately annoying heroine whose very capriciousness would prevent her from surfacing in any other novel or under any other writer's care.This is a brilliant, demented, and bizarro book that demands and rewards all the attention a reader might dare to give it. Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.

Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.

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Prologue The Story of My Ill-Fated Origins Illiterates, Abecedarians, Elitists, Rodents all​--I will tell you this: I, Zebra, born Bibi Abbas Abbas Hosseini on a scorching August day in 1982, am a descendent of a long line of self-taught men who repeatedly abandoned their capital, Tehran, where blood has been washed with blood for a hundred years, to take refuge in Nowshahr, in the languid, damp regions of Mazandaran. There, hemmed in by the rugged green slopes of the Elborz Mountains and surrounded by ample fields of rice, cotton, and tea, my forbearers pursued the life of the mind. There, too, I was born and lived the early part of my life. My father, Abbas Abbas Hosseini​--​multilingual translator of great and small works of literature, man with a thick mustache fashioned after Nietzsche's--was in charge of my education. He taught me Spanish, Italian, Catalan, Hebrew, Turkish, Arabic, English, Farsi, French, German. I was taught to know the languages of the oppressed and the oppressors because, according to my father, and to my father's father, and to his father before that, the wheels of history are always turning and there is no knowing who will be run over next. I picked up languages the way some people pick up viruses. I was armed with literature. As a family, we possess a great deal of intelligence​--​a kind of superintellect--​but we came into this world, one after the other, during the era when Nietzsche famously said that God is dead. We believe that death is the reason why we have always been so terribly shortchanged when it comes to luck. We are ill-fated, destined to wander in perpetual exile across a world hostile to our intelligence. In fact, possessing an agile intellect with literary overtones has only served to worsen our fate. But it is what we know and have. We are convinced that ink runs through our veins instead of blood. My father was educated by three generations of self-taught philosophers, poets, and painters: his father, Dalir Abbas Hosseini; his grandfather, Arman Abbas Hosseini; his great-grandfather, Shams Abbas Hosseini. Our family emblem, inspired by Sumerian seals of bygone days, consists of a clay cylinder engraved with three As framed within a circle; the As stand for our most treasured roles, listed here in order of importance: Autodidacts, Anarchists, Atheists. The following motto is engraved underneath the cylinder: In this false world, we guard our lives with our deaths. The motto also appears at the bottom of a still life of a mallard hung from a noose, completed by my great-great-grandfather, Shams Abbas Hosseini, in the aftermath of Iran's failed Constitutional Revolution at the turn of the twentieth century. Upon finishing the painting, he pointed at it with his cane, nearly bludgeoning the mallard's face with its tip and, his voice simultaneously crackling with disillusionment and fuming with rage, famously declared to his son, my great-grandfather, Arman Abbas Hosseini, "Death is coming, but we literati will remain as succulent as this wild duck!" This seemingly futile moment marked the beginning of our long journey toward nothingness, into the craggy pits of this measly universe. Generation after generation, our bodies have been coated with the dust of death. Our hearts have been extinguished, our lives leveled. We are weary, as thin as rakes, hacked into pieces. But we believe our duty is to persevere against a world hell-bent on eliminating the few who dare to sprout in the collective manure of degenerate humans. That's where I come into the picture. I--​astonished and amazed at the magnitude of the darkness that surrounds us--am the last in a long line of valiant thinkers. Upon my birth, the fifth of August 1982, and on its anniversary every year thereafter, as a rite of passage, my father, Abbas Abbas Hosseini, whispered a monologue titled "A Manifesto of Historical Time and the Corrected Philosophy of Iranian History: A Hosseini Secret" into my ear. I include it here, transcribed verbatim from memory.   Ill-omened child, I present you with the long and the short of our afflicted country, Iran: Supposed Land of the Aryans. In 550 BC, Cyrus the Great, King of the Four Corners of the World, brave and benevolent man, set out on a military campaign from the kingdom of Anshan in Parsa near the Gulf, site of the famous ruins of Persepolis, to conquer the Medes and the Lydians and the Babylonians. Darius and Xerxes the Great, his most famous successors, continued erecting the commodious empire their father had begun through the peaceful seizing of neighboring peoples. But just as facts are overtaken by other facts, all great rulers are eclipsed by their envious competitors. Search the world east to west, north to south; nowhere will you find a shortage of tyrants, all expertly trained to sniff out weak prey. Eventually, Cyrus the Great's line of ruling progeny came to an end with Alexander the Great, virile youth whose legacy was, in turn, overshadowed by a long line of new conquerors, each of whom briefly took pleasure in the rubble of dynasties past. Every one of us in Iran is a hybrid individual best described as a residue of a composite of fallen empires. If you were to look at us collectively, you would see a voluble and troubled nation. Imagine a person with multiple heads and a corresponding number of arms and legs. How is such a person, one body composed of so many, supposed to conduct herself? She will spend a lifetime beating her heads against one another, lifting up one pair of her arms in order to strangle the head of another. We, the people--​varied, troubled, heterogeneous​--have been scrambling like cockroaches across this land for centuries without receiving so much as a nod from our diverse rulers. They have never looked at us; they have only ever looked in the mirror. What is the consequence of such disregard? An eternal return of uprisings followed by mass murder and suffocating repression. I could not say which of the two is worse. In the words of Yevgeny Zamyatin: Revolutions are infinite. By the twentieth century, the Persian empire's frontiers had been hammered so far back that the demarcating boundary of our shrunken nation was bruised; it was black and blue! Every fool knows that in order to keep surviving that which expands has to contract. Just look at the human heart. My own, reduced to a stone upon the double deaths of my father and my father's father, both murdered by our so-called leaders, is plump and fleshy again; your birth has sent fresh blood rushing through its corridors. Hear me, child: The details of the history of our nation are nothing but a useless inventory of facts unless they are used to illuminate the wretched nature of our universal condition. The core of the matter, the point of this notable monologue, is to expose the artful manipulation of historical time through the creation of false narratives rendered as truth and exercised by the world's rulers with expert precision for hundreds of years. Think of our own leaders' lies as exhibit A. Let us shuffle through them one by one. When the century was still young, our people attempted the Constitutional Revolution but failed. In time, that failure produced the infamous Reza Shah Pahlavi, who ruled the country with thuggery and intimidation. Years later, during the Second World War, Mr. Pahlavi was sent into exile by the British, those nosy and relentless chasers of money--​those thieves, if we're being honest. And what, child, do you think happened then? Pahlavi's son, Mohammad Reza Shah Pahlavi, who was greener than a tree in summer, stepped up to the throne. Claiming to be the metaphysical descendent of the benevolent Cyrus the Great, the visionary Mohammad Reza Shah Pahlavi, anointed himself the "King of Kings" and launched the White Revolution, a chain of reforms designed to yank the country's citizens into modernity by hook or by crook. Excerpted from Call Me Zebra by Azareen Van der Vliet Oloomi All rights reserved by the original copyright owners. Excerpts are provided for display purposes only and may not be reproduced, reprinted or distributed without the written permission of the publisher.

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