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Winnipeg Free Press - PRINT EDITION

Eggers' non-fiction story Kafkaesque nonetheless

Reviewed by: Ezra Glinter

26/07/2009 1:00 AM | Comments: 0

Zeitoun

By Dave Eggers

McSweeney's, 342 pages, $31

When American Dave Eggers burst onto the literary scene in 2000 with his memoir, A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius, many critics considered him to be just another navel-gazing Generation X-er.

With his past few books, however, Eggers has proved himself to be anything but self-absorbed.

Eggers' latest book, Zeitoun, continues in the same vein of non-fiction storytelling as What Is the What, his barely fictional 2006 novel about Valentino Achak Deng, a real-life survivor of the Sudanese civil war.

Presented as Deng's own memoir, What Is the What describes the horrific suffering of Southern Sudanese refugees and the bewildering experiences of those who were fortunate enough to immigrate to the U.S.

Zeitoun similarly addresses the difficulties inflicted on immigrants by bureaucratic, unsympathetic government agencies. Its subject is Abdulrahman Zeitoun, a Syrian-born resident of New Orleans, who gets caught up in the bizarre machinations of the American justice system during hurricane Katrina.

Born in the Mediterranean coastal village of Jableh, Zeitoun spent almost 10 years travelling the world on merchant ships before settling in Louisiana, where he became a successful construction contractor. His wife, Kathy, is an American from Baton Rouge, who converted to Islam after her first marriage.

When the warnings about Hurricane Katrina start coming in, Zeitoun decides to stay and ride out the storm. Though Kathy and their four children take shelter with her family in Baton Rouge, he feels that he has too many interests in the city to simply leave.

Though the flooding from the storm is severe, in the days following Katrina everything seems to be slowly getting back to normal. Zeitoun paddles through the streets in his second-hand canoe, helping neighbours who are still around and feeding the abandoned dogs of those who aren't.

Around a week after the hurricane, while making a phone call from one of his own buildings, Zeitoun is violently arrested by police and military personnel, on the vague suspicion of looting and generally being up to no good.

It is here that Eggers' book takes a dark, Kafkaesque turn. Zeitoun is imprisoned in a makeshift jail with no amenities, and then in a maximum security facility, all without being Mirandized, charged, arraigned or allowed to make a phone call to tell his wife that he isn't dead.

Guards accustomed to dealing with genuine murderers and rapists are brutally unsympathetic to his pleas for explanation. Being an Arab in America after 9/11, doesn't help either, and he is afraid of what may happen to him, given that nobody knows where he is or if he's even alive.

When Zeitoun finally gets a court date, his lawyer tells Kathy to assemble character witnesses. But when she calls the New Orleans district attorney's office, she is told that the location of the court is "private information."

Unlike Eggers' previous work, Zeitoun is strictly non-fiction, and Eggers eschews his previous stylistic extravagances for clear, professional prose.

But like the New Journalism of the 1960s and '70s, Zeitoun also uses fictional techniques to tell a factual story.

Though the book reads more like a long-form magazine article than like a novel, the narrative is told strictly from the perspective of the Zeitoun family, with no big picture analysis and only a brief attempt to get more than one side of the story.

Nevertheless, the events depicted in Zeitoun are enough to disturb even the most optimistic observers of the American justice system.

Ezra Glinter is a Winnipeg writer and freelance journalist.

Republished from the Winnipeg Free Press print edition July 26, 2009 B9

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