A Syrian-American entrepreneur runs up against overzealous National Guard troops and a nonfunctioning bureaucracy in the wake of Hurricane Katrina.
My thoughts
This is a vivid portrait of a great American city devastated by a natural disaster and an American citizen victimized by law enforcement run amok. Dave Eggers won an American Book Award for Zeitoun. I'd never read any of his books, and now I see why he's lauded as one of the best writers of his generation. His writing style is fluid and eminently readable. He has a gift for bringing events to life and making it feel like you're experiencing the sounds, smells, and sights in his books, and that's especially powerful in Zeitoun. Eggers describes how silent the city was, how dark it got at night, how clear the water was in the beginning and how polluted it got as the days went by.
I was moving when Hurricane Katrina hit New Orleans, so I didn't have TV or Internet and wasn't as connected as I normally am. Zeitoun made me realize the extent of the madness for the first time (nearly 10 years later). Eggers writes of National Guardsmen who refused to help rescue or evacuate people (what were they there for, if not that?), leaving civilians to help each other as best they could.
The first chunk of the book actually made it seem fun to be in New Orleans immediately after the hurricane struck. Zeitoun had weathered the storm at home, and after the city flooded he happily paddled around in his canoe, feeding the neighbors' dogs and checking on the rental properties he owned. But then the story shifts to his wife Kathy's point of view. She had evacuated the city with their kids and he had been calling her from one of the rentals, where the phones still worked. But then the calls stopped and she had no idea what had happened to him.
Eggers tells the story wholly from the Zeitouns' perspective. Hurricane Katrina hit New Orleans only four years after the 9/11 terrorist attacks when the United States was fighting wars in both Afghanistan and Iraq. 9/11 had shown the United States that it is vulnerable to terrorist attacks, but it's difficult to excuse the arrogance and ignorance of the National Guardsmen who jumped to the conclusion that Zeitoun was a terrorist and insisted, "You're Taliban."
It was impossible for me to see the events unfolding in Ferguson and not compare them to this book. In both cases, people in power (the National Guard in Zeitoun and the police force in Ferguson) saw evil where none existed. In Zeitoun's case, the people who arrested him in a house he owned became convinced that he was a terrorist bent on exploiting the storm-ravaged city, presumably because of his ethnicity. In Ferguson, police responded with unnecessary force to perceived threats, arresting journalists who were just doing their jobs and presumably rounding up others who hadn't done anything wrong. This isn't to say there weren't looters in New Orleans after Katrina or in Ferguson during the protests, but in both cases law enforcement officials ended up hurting the people they were supposed to protect. Race and culture played an important role in both situations. When taken in this context, Zeitoun is all the more provocative.
Zeitoun was published in 2009 and at the end of the book Eggers suggests that the family lived happily ever after. They welcomed a baby boy and rebuilt their contracting business. I don't know how much Eggers knew about their personal lives or their relationship with each other, but the book depicted them as a loving couple who were fiercely devoted to each other. That was evidently not the case. The Zeitouns divorced in 2012 and Kathy claimed her husband had been abusive throughout their marriage, and in 2013 Zeitoun was found not guilty on charges that he tried to kill Kathy. That inevitably changes my perception of Zeitoun the man, but I think Zeitoun the book stands independently as an indictment of the situation in New Orleans immediately after the hurricane.
Bottom line
A thought-provoking account of religious and cultural tensions in the United States.
Fine print
Zeitoun, by Dave Eggers
Genre: non-fiction, current events
Photo from Goodreads
I borrowed this book from my library.
