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This Is Not Civilization: A Literary Debut from an Apache Reservation to Central Asia
In the tradition of Prague and White Teeth, This Is Not Civilization is an inspired, sweeping debut novel that hopscotches from Arizona to Central Asia to Istanbul with a well-meaning, if misguided, young Peace Corps volunteer. Jeff Hartig lies at the center of this modern take on the American-abroad tale, which brings together four people from vastly different backgrounds, each struggling with the push and pull of home. A young Apache, Adam Dale, forsakes the reservation for the promise of a world he knows little about. Anarbek Tashtanaliev, of post-Soviet Kyrgyzstan, operates a cheese factory that no longer produces cheese. Nazira, his daughter, strains against the confines of their village’s age-old traditions.
With captivating insight, realism, and humor, Robert Rosenberg delivers a sensitive story about the cost of trying to do good in the world.
With captivating insight, realism, and humor, Robert Rosenberg delivers a sensitive story about the cost of trying to do good in the world.
304 pages, Paperback
First published January 1, 2004
11 people are currently reading
149 people want to read
About the author
Robert Rosenberg
3 books5 followersRobert Rosenberg's first novel, This Is Not Civilization (Houghton Mifflin, 2004) won the 2005 Maria Thomas Award. It was a Borders Original Voices Selection, a BookSense selection, and a Paperback Row selection in the New York Times Book Review. Rosenberg has been awarded fellowships from the Black Mountain Institute and the Iowa Writers Workshop. His writing and reviews have appeared in Witness, West Branch, the Miami Herald, and the Moscow Times. Rosenberg has served as a Peace Corps volunteer in Kyrgyzstan, has lived and taught in both Istanbul and on the White Mountain Apache Reservation, and is currently an Assistant Professor of English at Bucknell University.
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Displaying 1 - 30 of 32 reviews
December 17, 2013
In a typically wry passage of "Walden," Thoreau claims, "If I knew for a certainty that a man was coming to my house with the conscious design of doing me good, I should run for my life." It's a line that captures our ambivalent attitude about charity, what's now distilled to an extracurricular activity for high school students trying to improve the world - or their transcripts. Charity labors under the same denigration that ruined the word "pity," which we all know nobody wants. In these conservative times, anyone who hands out a meal is likely to be admonished that it's better to teach a man to fish, particularly if someone else does the teaching, preferably at a for-profit charter school.
A debut novel by Robert Rosenberg explores the challenges of charity with refreshing good humor and insight. "This Is Not Civilization" follows a young Peace Corps worker named Jeff Hartig as he helps people on an Indian reservation in Arizona, in a village in the post-Soviet country of Kyrgyzstan, and in the earthquake devastation of Istanbul in 1999.
Rosenberg himself was a Peace Corps volunteer in Kyrgyzstan, he won a fellowship to work on the White Mountain Apache Reservation in Arizona, and he taught in Istanbul during the earthquake. As you might expect, those wide experiences give the author an extraordinary store of detail to create the exotic places Jeff seeks out in his restless quest.
What's unexpected, though, is the way Rosenberg allows this autobiographical adventure to rotate away from his fictive persona. Other characters periodically move to the forefront, not as objects of Jeff's benevolence or paragons of primitive virtue, but as people just as earnest and noble and foolish as Jeff is.
The novel's richest scenes take place in a forgotten mountain village in Kyrgyzstan, where a father named Anarbek manages a communist-era cheese factory that produces no cheese. While the rest of the country stumbles toward privatization, a bureaucratic oversight keeps subsidy checks flowing from the capital. Anarbek knows they're living on borrowed time, but in this barren, mountainous village there is nothing else do to. "We're still making a profit!" he assures the workers who arrive each day to sit and chat.
Anarbek's home life is just as precarious. A hot-headed young man has attempted to marry his daughter, Nazira, through an old custom called wife stealing. When Nazira escapes her beau/abductor and flees back home, Anarbek faces the dilemma of turning her away in deference to their ancient ways or taking her back in an act of public humiliation.
News that an American teacher of English is coming to the village lifts everyone's spirits. They're hoping for someone like Madonna or Sharon Stone, but when Jeff appears sporting a straight set of teeth, they embrace him with the zealous hospitality that tradition demands. Indeed, Jeff barely survives their enthusiasm; nauseating meals and exhausting celebrations leave him desperate for a moment of privacy.
This is risky comedy that in less deft hands would clunk into condescension, but Rosenberg keeps it aloft with a sweet sense of appreciation. The meals and rituals and costumes he describes are unimaginably foreign, but the earnestness and pride he captures in these people ennoble them.
"Adrift on waves of good intentions," Jeff has come to Kyrgyzstan after a disappointing retreat from an Apache reservation in Arizona, where he tried to establish a youth center. Ironically, halfway around the world, in this Central Asian village impossibly different from the native American settlement he left behind, Jeff finds the old complications of human nature essentially unchanged: The demands of modern business mesh poorly with ancient traditions; even desperate people are reluctant to give up their meager security for the slim chance of future prosperity.
As he tries to get Anarbek to move his factory beyond the cheesemaking charade, Jeff finds himself falling into the same ruse, claiming his students are making good progress. Only Anarbek's disgraced daughter Nazira, who also teaches English, seems to realize what's really happening, but she's too entranced by Jeff to object.
Two years later, when Jeff leaves their village, Nazira knows she must presume nothing about his devotion to her, but his genuine goodness is so beguiling that she can't resist fanning a little flame of hope in her otherwise realistic heart.
In the novel's final section, Rosenberg draws these characters to Turkey with a clever, almost comical, move that levels the playing field, forcing each of them to be the visiting foreigner. The ancient streets of Istanbul, studded with marks of modernity, provide a perfect setting for Anarbek, Jeff, and one of his Apache students from Arizona to consider the responsibilities that root them to the past.
Rosenberg's greatest challenge is moving between the large and small scales that his story demands. He has trouble conveying the passage of time, creating that accumulation of physical and mental detail that makes us believe characters have experienced more than we've been shown. And he's far better at capturing intimate gatherings like the Kyrgyz birthday party high in the mountains than panoramic scenes like the national celebration that draws 50,000 people.
But what a generous, big-hearted book this is, perceptive enough to catch the goodness in all these well- intentioned people. Each of them endures the sting of inadequacy, but they're all tethered to a sense of compassion that snaps them back from despair. Yes, the incurably charitable are hungering for their own salvation in the act of feeding others, but that cynical insight, Rosenberg argues, mustn't lead us to scorn the whole enterprise. In an era that gave us the term "compassion fatigue," his novel is a gentle rousing by someone who understands the complicated rewards of caring.
http://www.csmonitor.com/2004/0615/p1...
A debut novel by Robert Rosenberg explores the challenges of charity with refreshing good humor and insight. "This Is Not Civilization" follows a young Peace Corps worker named Jeff Hartig as he helps people on an Indian reservation in Arizona, in a village in the post-Soviet country of Kyrgyzstan, and in the earthquake devastation of Istanbul in 1999.
Rosenberg himself was a Peace Corps volunteer in Kyrgyzstan, he won a fellowship to work on the White Mountain Apache Reservation in Arizona, and he taught in Istanbul during the earthquake. As you might expect, those wide experiences give the author an extraordinary store of detail to create the exotic places Jeff seeks out in his restless quest.
What's unexpected, though, is the way Rosenberg allows this autobiographical adventure to rotate away from his fictive persona. Other characters periodically move to the forefront, not as objects of Jeff's benevolence or paragons of primitive virtue, but as people just as earnest and noble and foolish as Jeff is.
The novel's richest scenes take place in a forgotten mountain village in Kyrgyzstan, where a father named Anarbek manages a communist-era cheese factory that produces no cheese. While the rest of the country stumbles toward privatization, a bureaucratic oversight keeps subsidy checks flowing from the capital. Anarbek knows they're living on borrowed time, but in this barren, mountainous village there is nothing else do to. "We're still making a profit!" he assures the workers who arrive each day to sit and chat.
Anarbek's home life is just as precarious. A hot-headed young man has attempted to marry his daughter, Nazira, through an old custom called wife stealing. When Nazira escapes her beau/abductor and flees back home, Anarbek faces the dilemma of turning her away in deference to their ancient ways or taking her back in an act of public humiliation.
News that an American teacher of English is coming to the village lifts everyone's spirits. They're hoping for someone like Madonna or Sharon Stone, but when Jeff appears sporting a straight set of teeth, they embrace him with the zealous hospitality that tradition demands. Indeed, Jeff barely survives their enthusiasm; nauseating meals and exhausting celebrations leave him desperate for a moment of privacy.
This is risky comedy that in less deft hands would clunk into condescension, but Rosenberg keeps it aloft with a sweet sense of appreciation. The meals and rituals and costumes he describes are unimaginably foreign, but the earnestness and pride he captures in these people ennoble them.
"Adrift on waves of good intentions," Jeff has come to Kyrgyzstan after a disappointing retreat from an Apache reservation in Arizona, where he tried to establish a youth center. Ironically, halfway around the world, in this Central Asian village impossibly different from the native American settlement he left behind, Jeff finds the old complications of human nature essentially unchanged: The demands of modern business mesh poorly with ancient traditions; even desperate people are reluctant to give up their meager security for the slim chance of future prosperity.
As he tries to get Anarbek to move his factory beyond the cheesemaking charade, Jeff finds himself falling into the same ruse, claiming his students are making good progress. Only Anarbek's disgraced daughter Nazira, who also teaches English, seems to realize what's really happening, but she's too entranced by Jeff to object.
Two years later, when Jeff leaves their village, Nazira knows she must presume nothing about his devotion to her, but his genuine goodness is so beguiling that she can't resist fanning a little flame of hope in her otherwise realistic heart.
In the novel's final section, Rosenberg draws these characters to Turkey with a clever, almost comical, move that levels the playing field, forcing each of them to be the visiting foreigner. The ancient streets of Istanbul, studded with marks of modernity, provide a perfect setting for Anarbek, Jeff, and one of his Apache students from Arizona to consider the responsibilities that root them to the past.
Rosenberg's greatest challenge is moving between the large and small scales that his story demands. He has trouble conveying the passage of time, creating that accumulation of physical and mental detail that makes us believe characters have experienced more than we've been shown. And he's far better at capturing intimate gatherings like the Kyrgyz birthday party high in the mountains than panoramic scenes like the national celebration that draws 50,000 people.
But what a generous, big-hearted book this is, perceptive enough to catch the goodness in all these well- intentioned people. Each of them endures the sting of inadequacy, but they're all tethered to a sense of compassion that snaps them back from despair. Yes, the incurably charitable are hungering for their own salvation in the act of feeding others, but that cynical insight, Rosenberg argues, mustn't lead us to scorn the whole enterprise. In an era that gave us the term "compassion fatigue," his novel is a gentle rousing by someone who understands the complicated rewards of caring.
http://www.csmonitor.com/2004/0615/p1...
May 27, 2009
The idea of using porn films to encourage the dairy cows to breed was a poor one. And so goes the first line of this unique book. Although this first line borders on whimsy, the story does not. If I were to describe this story I might say it is one of a bunch of cultures bumping into one another and trying to make sense of that contact with each other. It takes a tragedy to illustrate that deep down we hold the same things in high regard: security, family, and friends. The writing is neither stark nor overly descriptive.
March 10, 2011
Loved how the author managed to successfully weave an intricate story about relationships & cultures that span 3 countries - the US, Kyrgyzstan & Istanbul. The characters were well developed and the ending seemed sad, but I really liked it - life doesn't always have neat, happy endings ... even though I wouldn't mind that either.
August 11, 2023
Another story about a thoughtless white man going to a poor country, being shocked by the poverty, making lots of bad decisions, and not having to reap the consequences of his actions. Pretty much highlights everything that’s wrong with the Peace Corps.
The only storyline I did enjoy was Nazira’s.
The only storyline I did enjoy was Nazira’s.
April 20, 2021
Interesting fictional account based in author's experiences living in Kyrgyzstan Instanbul and the Apache nation in AZ as a peace corps volunteer. Flight to CUN gate attendant raved about this author. Will read his other work.
March 31, 2024
While I thought the book got off to a slow start, it became very interesting once all of the characters' stories came together. I liked that the author had actually lived in the different locations where most of the events take place. This helped to make the descriptions more authentic.
Read
July 26, 2019It was really interesting to read something set in parts of the world that I don't know much about, but I was okay with just skimming the second half of the book.
November 6, 2022
Book club
April 22, 2009
I really enjoyed this book. I lived in Central Asia for 5 years, so any novel that has a connection w/CA is intriguing enough for me to pick up. This book tells the story of Jeff, a Peace Corps volunteer who ends up in a village in Kyrghyzstan; Adam, his friend and former student from an Apache reservation; and Nazira and her father, Jeff's friends from Central Asia. We hear different parts of each of their stories, and they eventually all end up together in Istanbul. What I really liked about this book were the fascinating foreign locales. Some of the characters could have used more development, but the events and locations made this a fascinating read and the Rosenberg deftly turned his personal experiences into believable and accurately detailed prose. It definitely gives insight into several little known parts of the world. This is one I'd be willing to read again. I especially recommend it to all my world traveling friends.
This entire review has been hidden because of spoilers.
February 16, 2009
What I liked best about this book is the character development of the 4 main characters over the course of time - the American nomad, the Native American teenager becomes young adult, the Kyrgyzstan woman & her father. The cultures weave in & out - the narrative allows you to become absorbed in each of the characters thoughts & lives to explore their complexities. Your feelings for the characters change over the course of the book. And of course the descriptions of where the story takes place - on a reservation in Arizona, in Central Asia, and in Istanbul - are all rich. I guess the only reason I didn't give 5 stars is because I didn't want it to end. A couple more chapters would have made me even happier :)
October 19, 2007
Of the crop of "young western idealist goes to the third world/i joined the peace corps and wrote a novel" books, this one stands out. Perhaps it is the humor that allows Rosenberg to confront the complications of doing good works without resorting to cynicisim or naivite. And, while the geography of the book follows the autobigraphical trajectory of the author, the book aspires to, and achieves, telling a larger and more expansive story from multiple points of view. More props to Rosenberg for bucking the trendy stunt of nameing the naive man abroad after himself.
October 27, 2007
I read this a while ago (will probably be the intro on many of these reviews) so I don't recall all of my opinions except that I really enjoyed the humor which is all too rare among the books I read. This is fiction that travels the path of the author's own peace corps and other service stays at a native american reservation, turkey and some -stan in EAstern Europe. He also has some really bad luck.
July 20, 2009
I would have liked this book more if it were not so sad. I felt like the ending was almost nihilistic, as if the author were actually trying to communicate that people can't change and adapt. Why couldn't Adam go to the Kyrgyz village with Nazira? I felt like there was a strong theme that cultural boundaries can't be successfully transcended, and I just don't think that is true. Because of that, the ending seemed more forced to me.
This entire review has been hidden because of spoilers.
December 17, 2012
This is not a book that I would normally read, but I really enjoyed it anyway. There was very little action and quite a bit of drama, but the human interactions were intriguing to me. I also thought the dialog was well thought out and lent a sense of depth to the story. The interactions between characters seemed very real to me, even though I'm not familiar with the cultures of most of the characters in the book.
Read
February 25, 2015Saw a picture of "Herdsmen from the Kyrgyz ethnic group hold their falcons as they ride on horses during a hunting competition in the Xinjiang Uighur Autonomous region" (the picture's captions) and I had a flashback to a book I read a long time ago. Had to do some research to find it, but here it is! Should probably re-read it seeing as just one picture brought back such a vivid memory of a book I hadn't thought of in years.
October 12, 2008
Perhaps because I live the expat life and perhaps because I grew up among the Apaches in N. Arizona, but I felt a hollowness, a surface-skimming at the heart of this book. With the modern communications (available since at least the late 1990's in all parts of the world dicussed in this book), the ending rings a bit falsely.
April 10, 2010
This book definitely told the story of "doing good" and how it sometimes doesn't work out the way that we expect it to. I enjoyed the book, but it was slow moving at times. None of the characters end up the way that you would expect, which I guess could be a good thing, but it is also a sad way to end the story. An interesting read and good way to look at our "good works".
October 20, 2008
great book by former peace corp member who's tour was based in kyrgyzstan, fiction but obviously based on actual accounts...a little slow in parts but overall great read; probably more for me having an interest in that part of the world...
December 26, 2008
A novel- interesting and engaging. I liked reliving a peace corps volunteer's life experience. I share many of the character's idealistic values and also the bittersweet experiences of the world of development work. A good vacation read!
February 10, 2010
A book focusing on the stories of lost souls and the unlikely intersection of the lives of three very different people. Takes place in the US, post-Soviet Kyrgyzstan and Turkey. Did not make me interested in ever visiting Kyrgyzstan - sounds like the armpit of the earth.
May 23, 2011
Bizarre. Can you inspire milk cows to reproduce by screening bad pornography in the barns? It worked with Chinese pandas but it might take more than that and more than an American Peace Corps volunteer to change the post soviet culture of a tiny Kyrg village.
October 13, 2014
Full disclosure. The author and I were both Peace Corps volunteers at the same time in Kyrgyzstan so consider my review with that in mind.
The book is a sensitive, well-written fictionalized account of the realities of development work.
The book is a sensitive, well-written fictionalized account of the realities of development work.
May 30, 2007
This book helped me accept that going back to my home town wasnt a bad thing.
March 24, 2008
An excellent read. There are five or six great stories in this book!
May 31, 2009
This book was ok, but not at all what I'd expected. I found the stories of Nazira, Anarbek, and Adam interesting but Jeff irritated me. The ending was satisfying although not "happy".
November 7, 2009
Arizona, Kyrgyzstan, Turkey
Highly unlikely, withonly one admirable character - Nazira
Highly unlikely, withonly one admirable character - Nazira
February 4, 2010
Switching to my stash of southwest fiction. I couldn't get into. A cynical downer when I wasn't in the mood.
November 25, 2010
UAA Anchorage book of the year 2010-2011
June 14, 2011
loved it..Thanks Petie
July 12, 2012
Kyrgystan-Peace Corps.
Displaying 1 - 30 of 32 reviews