Review by New York Times Review
Alessandro DAvenia is a best-selling author in his native Italy and around the world. He has many fans and gives TED Talks, in which he speaks just as he writes. In a publishing world that rewards E. L. James and Dan Brown with millions in sales while many devotees of craft and language labor in poverty, D'Avenia is a star. His third novel, "What Hell Is Not," based on a true story and translated by Jeremy Parzen, follows Federico, a bookish teenager from Palermo who, just before a summer of study in England, is recruited by his teacher, the kind Don Pino, to mentor children in a poor neighborhood plagued by Mafia violence. Federico wants to read, to write, to fall in love. Don Pino offers wisdom, hope and goodness. Any potential for a profound narrative in this promising setup is thwarted by the writing, which is bloated and indulgent. The book's dreamy musings and vague scenes are laden with metaphors so mixed it can require several reads just to take in their true awfulness. Federico pines for a girl: "She's the one who rummages through his heart, in the tangle where dreams grow. Things bathed in too much light cast the same amount of shadow. Every light has its grieving." Abeat later: "He covers his acerbic face with his hands, as if he could feel his visage with his fingers. He resembles a sailor on the pier as he waits for a contract following mandatory shore leave.... He allows light, wind and salt to reshape his flesh and thoughts." It is difficult to know whom to blame, author or translator, for the manic descriptions, desperate reflections and mangled aphorisms. Who thought "trots along like a sleepwalker" (try to picture that) or "a bullet is instant destiny" should be written down in any language? But Parzen didn't create this frightful simile: "Life seems like those textbook equations whose solutions are found in the lower right hand of the page, framed by parentheses. But he never gets the procedure right. And it worries him that two minuses make a plus and a minus and a plus a minus." The novel's images are contorted, its metaphors removed from the physical world. "Curtains flap like snakes against the heat-besieged windows." Humanity "explodes like a seed." (Do snakes flap, the reader asks, or seeds explode?) Every dead thing is compared to fish, every dark or mysterious thing to Arabs. As a woman is raped, "her eyes are like those of a fish dumped out onto the shore," and D'Avenia ends the chapter thus, as if to preen: "A piece of meat in a piece of meat can wound just as much." Translation is a tricky business, but did this grotesque analogy sound O.K. in Italian? D'Avenia's authorial style may be "more is more," but even when no words are needed, he still offers a dozen: "The Hunter doesn't utter a word. Attitude is all someone with power needs and words only get in the way unless they are absolutely necessary." Never have I read a more unintentionally ironic sentence. D'Avenia's relationship to simile is misguided and cynical: used to obfuscate, not clarify. Federico, styled as a poet, claims to love "the metaphor that dislocates reality." But the purpose of rhetoric isn't to dislodge; it is to ground. Kenneth Burke famously wrote that metaphor "brings out the thisness of a that, or the thatness of a this," to make the intangible tangible. Nothing in this novel is tangible. Page after page, the reader senses that something has gone terribly wrong here. Somewhere between the writing, editing and translation the audience has been dismissed, and all beauty murdered like poor Don Pino. The question of audience is answered more deliberately by Jamil Jan Kochai, an Iowa M.F.A. candidate whose debut novel, "99 Nights in Logar," is crafted with care, respect and a hard-earned and profound understanding of its readership. It is funny, razor-sharp and full of juicy tales that feel urgent and illicit, turning the reader into a lucky, trilingual fly on the wall in a family loaded with secrets and prone to acquiring more. The narrator, 12-year-old Marwand, is returning from America with his brothers and parents to his family's compound in Logar province in eastern Afghanistan, where over the course of 99 days he reconnects with a house full of saucy and callused aunts and uncles, crashes a wedding in a stolen burqa, has his finger bitten off and his Coolpix stolen, and gets lost in a deathly maze of compounds that may or may not be a hallucination. The novel opens with four boys running away from their distracted parents to search for a rabid old dog from whom Marwand seeks forgiveness for tortures past. But in 2005, Afghanistan is wild, full of killers: "The psychopathic white boys, the ravenous bandits, the Ts and the gunmen and the drug runners, the kidney kidnappers, the robots in the sky." The ensuing adventure is witty and engaging, somewhat allegorical, thrumming with the histories of foreign wars and with memories of lives lost and childhoods cut short. When Marwand's father is tempted to stay in the States, his wife reminds him of their own culpability, living and working there. "I don't support the invaders," he says, thinking of the excesses of American bases, the heroin, the chai boys. And yet, the family's return to America is inevitable; this is only a single nostalgic summer spent marrying off daughters, sharing platters of rice and remembering. The novel is constructed out of spoken stories within stories, each more embellished than the last ("It's O.K. to change a story a little if you can make it better"), shared over evening chai, or while waiting for help on the roadside, or watching explosions on a distant mountain. One character narrates until he can't continue, Marwand tells us, and at "the point in the story I most wanted to hear, someone else took a sip of his chai and began his own story, and so on and so forth, until everyone was given a say and not a single story was actually finished." When Marwand argues to his father that American TV has tales just as good as the ones told in Logar, his father says, "But not our stories." And that is precisely the point. While the novel is written in English, it deprioritizes the Western reader. This is its most interesting accomplishment: It ignores the Western gaze, despite Kochai's firm grasp of its prose standards. The author has created a singular, resonant voice, an American teenager raised by Old World Afghan storytellers. He mixes Farsi and English and Pashto without the expectation that any one reader (except another Marwand) will understand all of it. There is an exoticism in the technique of peppering foreign words into English texts, then promptly translating them - a repetition much like breaking the fourth wall. But here are Farsi words untranslated for the reader, used only where Marwand would naturally speak in that tongue. Consider this sentence: "Although an imam had made the nikkah between Khaista and Atal official, giving them the holy right to" - insert sexual expletive - "as much as they pleased, poor Khaista was beset by her six idiot brothers, whose ghairat revealed itself only in times of ease or during opportunities for cruelty." The American reader doesn't need an interpreter in order to relish this voice, but an Afghan-American will enjoy it many times more. "Wallah," the band of cousins swear to one another, again and again - and that word evokes many of our childhoods. The final story, a sacred family tale about the death of a beloved uncle, a story foreshadowed throughout, is written entirely in Pashto script. This bold choice doesn't take away from the present narrative any more than do Scheherazade's elisions from her story, but the tale does enrich the novel for those who can read it - here is a secret reserved for some. Unlike the token applepolishing uncle, Kochai doesn't offer anything to the Americans for cheap. How refreshing that Kochai isn't posturing for the West, though he knows just how to entrance its reader. His images are precise, in harmony with the physical world. He doesn't dabble in Eastern melodrama unless he's satirizing. "This one time, at a wedding, Ruhollah Maamaa was having trouble with an AK during a machine-gun celebration": Such a sentence can only end riotously for a family whose rooster is named George Bush. Kochai has created an exciting and true voice, a young American proudly telling stories of his Afghan grandparents, of his cousins and brothers, without the need for Western approval. He doesn't alter a single word for their comfort, describing, for example, "hair so deeply brown it was almost blond," because, to us, brown is lighter than average. In that way, he respects his global audience all the more, while still claiming Afghan stories for Afghans. The success and failure of Kochai's and D'Avenia's novels, respectively, both published for Western readers, depend on their regard for that audience. One novel doesn't bother with any reader at all, while the other knowingly, respectfully looks another way. ? dina nayeri is the author, most recently, of "Refuge." Her next book, "The Ungrateful Refugee," will be published this year.
Copyright (c) The New York Times Company [June 2, 2019]
Review by Booklist Review
Kochai's debut chronicles the adventures of 12-year-old Marwand on a summer trip from the U.S. to the village of Logar, in Afghanistan, to visit family. Marwand quickly falls in with his two young uncles, Gul and Dawood, and his cousin Zia, and runs afoul of the family's guard dog, Budabash, who he tormented on a visit six years prior. Budabash lashes out at Marwand, biting off the tip of one of his fingers, and then runs off. Marwand, Gul, Dawood, and Zia set off to find the dog, venturing out into an Afghanistan still overrun with American soldiers and the resurgent Taliban. Along the way, the boys both hear and recount stories, painting a portrait of a country beset by occupying forces and internal unrest yet buoyed by a rich cultural history and a resilient population. Kochai captures the joys and the sorrows of life in Afghanistan, offering readers a glimpse into everyday life in a country whose people have grown so used to constant bombardment that they can differentiate between various types of IEDs by sound alone.--Kristine Huntley Copyright 2018 Booklist
From Booklist, Copyright (c) American Library Association. Used with permission.
Review by Publisher's Weekly Review
Kochai's debut is an imaginative, enthralling, and lyrical exploration of coming home-and coming-of-age-set amid the political tensions of modern Afghanistan. Twelve-year-old Marwand returns to his family's village of Logar in 2005-and on the very first day, has the tip of his index finger bitten off by the compound's fearsome guard dog, Budabash. Marwand, with his cousin, two "little uncles," and younger brother, then vow "jihad against Budabash"-as soon as they can find the runaway hound. The seemingly Huck Finn-like tale, however, slowly evolves into a mesmerizing collection of stories, first narrated by Marwand (who recounts the vicious beating he gave an old mutt when the family first settled in Afghanistan in 1999) and set against the backdrop of a war-torn region. Through nightly conversations in the family compound, Marwand discovers that talk "always seemed to circle back to war." His 99-day-long search for the devil dog Budabash is filled with the stories of events both real and imagined: a family wedding, a mysterious illness that takes down the household, and finally the dreamlike clash between Marwand and Budabash. Kochai is a masterful storyteller, and will leave readers eager for the next tale. (Jan.) c Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.
(c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
Review by Library Journal Review
DEBUT Part coming-of-age story and part contemporary history of Afghanistan, Kochai's debut novel is told in an episodic style reminiscent of The Arabian Nights. When 12-year-old Marwand returns to Afghanistan with his parents and brothers to see extended family, his first order of business is to visit the compound's menacing guard dog, Budabesh, who clearly has not forgotten a previous beating by Marwand and proceeds to bite off half of his index finger. The dog then escapes. From there the story is ostensibly about Marwand's search for the animal, but it eventually evolves into a picaresque tale, with Marwand and his crew encountering a cast of eccentric characters and landing in precarious, sometimes violent situations. What is real and what is imagined can be hard to ascertain. In the end, this is a work about family. Though war stains most of their shared history, their allegiance to one another stays constant. VERDICT While the writing is beautiful throughout, this novel ultimately asks a lot of the reader. Its chimerical nature may be a bit off-putting, and several scenes of animal cruelty can be tough to read. Still, libraries specializing in world literature will want to have this on hand as a fine example of the meeting of modern and traditional storytelling. [See Prepub Alert, 7/9/18.]-Stephen Schmidt, Greenwich Lib., CT © Copyright 2019. 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.
Review by Kirkus Book Review
An absorbing portrait of life in contemporary Afghanistan that is simultaneously raucous and heart-rending, told from a perspective we rarely hear: that of a young migr returning home to his war-torn country.In his debut novel, Kochai tells the story of Marwand, a 12-year-old whose family has returned to their home province of Logar, just south of American-occupied Kabul, at the height of the war on terror. Marwand hasn't been to his ancestral home since he was 6; he's an American boy who barely knows life in Logar. Worse, the landscape feels like anything but home: American bases and checkpoints pockmark the land as the central government in Kabul tries to tamp down a raging insurgency, and Taliban fighters roam Logar with impunity. Holed up in his mother's family compound and looking for some comfort, Marwand tries to pet the family dog, Budabashonly to find the wolflike animal less agreeable than the dogs he's used to in America. Budabash bites off a bit of his finger and runs away. Convinced that Budabash is a demon in disguise, Marwand sets out with a band of cousins to track the dog down and bring him back home. But that plot is really just an excuse for an extravagant outpouring of storytelling: Marwand encounters an enormous cast of aunts, uncles, cousins, and grandparents, all of whom have stories to tell about their family and the bloody history of the land they call home. The result is a novel that reads like a thrilling collision of Huckleberry Finn, Boccacio's The Decameron, and One Thousand and One Nights. As it careens between tragic stories of Afghanistan's history of perpetual warfare and magical realist tales of djinn, the novel threatens to become unwieldy at times, but Marwand is the thread that holds it together. Endowed with a voice that is at once street-smart and innocent, the boy speaks a language that is distinctly Afghan but retains the marks of his life as an American preteen. When his little brother, Gwora, demands to follow Marwand and his cousins on their quest to find Budabash, Marwand beats him into submission: "After the whupping, I left him in the orchard all crumpled up," he boasts, "...while me and the rest of the fellahs headed out onto the roads of Logar to search all day long for the wolf-dog who, just a few weeks ago, had bitten the tip off my index finger." Marwand's is the voice of an American kid who speaks a bit of Pakhto and whose favorite word happens to be "Wallah!" When Marwand and his cousins hide on top of a roof of the compound to eavesdrop on a conversation or don burqas so they can sneak into a bride's wedding party in search of a cousin's betrothed, the book seems like the very echo of Huckleberry Finn. With beautiful prose that encompasses the brutality of life in Afghanistan without overshadowing the warmth of family, culture, and storytelling, Kochai delivers a gorgeous and kaleidoscopic portrait of a land we're used to seeing through a single, insufficient lens: the war on terror.A vivid and moving novel about heritage, history, and the family bonds that transcend culture. Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
