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Call Me Zebra: A Coming-of-Age Trip Across the Mediterranean
Widely praised and winner of the PEN/Faulkner Award for Fiction among other mentions, Call Me Zebra follows a feisty heroine's idiosyncratic quest to reclaim her past by mining the wisdom of her literary icons — even as she navigates the murkier myseteries of love.Named a Best Book Entertainment Weekly, Harper's Bazaar, Boston Globe, Fodor's, Fast Company, Refinery29,Nylon, Los Angeles Review of Books, Book Riot, The Millions, Electric Literature, Bitch, Hello Giggles, Literary Hub, Shondaland, Bustle, Brit & Co., Vol. 1 Brooklyn, Read It Forward, Entropy Magazine, Chicago Review of Books, iBooks and Publishers WeeklyZebra is the last in a line of anarchists, atheists, and autodidacts. Alone and in exile, she leaves New York for Barcelona, retracing the journey she and her father made from Iran to the United States years ago. Books are her only companions—until she meets Ludo. Their connection is magnetic, and fraught. They push and pull across the Mediterranean, wondering if their love—or lust—can free Zebra from her past. Starring a heroine as quirky as Don Quixote, as brilliant as Virginia Woolf, as worldly as Miranda July, and as spirited as Lady Bird, Call Me Zebra is “hilarious and poignant, painting a magnetic portrait of a young woman you can’t help but want to know more about” (Harper’s Bazaar).
307 pages, Kindle Edition
First published February 6, 2018
309 people are currently reading
7715 people want to read
About the author
Azareen Van der Vliet Oloomi
9 books131 followersAwards: PEN/Faulkner Award for Fiction, Whiting Awards, 5 Under 35
Education: Brown University, University of California San Diego
Nominations: PEN/Open Book, Emerging Author
Azareen Van der Vliet Oloomi is an award-winning Iranian-American author. Her 2018 novel Call Me Zebra (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2018) is the winner of the PEN/Faulkner Award for Fiction and the John Gardner Award for Fiction, and was long-listed for the PEN Open Book Award.
Oloomi is also the author of Fra Keeler (Dorothy, a publishing project). She is the winner of a 2015 Whiting Writers' Award, a National Book Foundation "5 Under 35" honoree, the recipient of a MacDowell Fellowship, and a Fulbright Fellowship in Fiction to Catalonia, Spain. Her work has appeared in The Paris Review, GRANTA, Guernica, BOMB, and the Los Angeles Review of Books Quarterly Journal, among other places. She has lived in Iran, Spain, Italy, the United Arab Emirates, and currently teaches in the M.F.A. Program in Creative Writing at the University of Notre Dame. Call Me Zebra is being translated into half a dozen languages and Fra Keeler was published in Italian by Giulio Perrone Editore in 2015. She attended Brown University and the University of California San Diego, and now lives in the Chicago area.
Education: Brown University, University of California San Diego
Nominations: PEN/Open Book, Emerging Author
Azareen Van der Vliet Oloomi is an award-winning Iranian-American author. Her 2018 novel Call Me Zebra (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2018) is the winner of the PEN/Faulkner Award for Fiction and the John Gardner Award for Fiction, and was long-listed for the PEN Open Book Award.
Oloomi is also the author of Fra Keeler (Dorothy, a publishing project). She is the winner of a 2015 Whiting Writers' Award, a National Book Foundation "5 Under 35" honoree, the recipient of a MacDowell Fellowship, and a Fulbright Fellowship in Fiction to Catalonia, Spain. Her work has appeared in The Paris Review, GRANTA, Guernica, BOMB, and the Los Angeles Review of Books Quarterly Journal, among other places. She has lived in Iran, Spain, Italy, the United Arab Emirates, and currently teaches in the M.F.A. Program in Creative Writing at the University of Notre Dame. Call Me Zebra is being translated into half a dozen languages and Fra Keeler was published in Italian by Giulio Perrone Editore in 2015. She attended Brown University and the University of California San Diego, and now lives in the Chicago area.
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January 27, 2023
‘I hail from the land of not belonging, directly beyond the frontier of any nation.’
To disappear into literature seems a vacation to many, but in Call Me Zebra, the second novel by Azareen Van der Vliet Oloomi, this is a defense against the traumas of the world. Zebra is the story of a young woman with an immense passion for literature who is carrying the scars of a long history of violence and displacement and how she sets out on a literary ‘Grand Tour of Exile’ to better understand her lack of place in the world. Having escaped Iran with her father during the revolution, she has grown up as an “other” in the United States just post-9/11 where having been driven from her home has marked her as a threat in the eyes of Americans. Her father imposed a strict diet of literature and she believes the keys to understanding all reality is in the Matrix of Literature she has created in her memory. Marvelously intelligent, well-read and eccentric, Zebra is a character that often grates on those around her, people who find it easier to dismiss her instead of understand that she is a product of the worst parts of humanity and struggling to find her way in a world that has tried to snuff her out and deny her space within it. Admittedly this is not a book that will vibe with everyone due to its very effective yet affected prose styling and long-winded ponderings on literature as well as the eccentricities of narrative itself, but for those who do connect this is a really rewarding work. This one really worked for me. Call Me Zebra is a brilliant and darkly-comedic exploration of exile, literature, victimization and the framework of human history constructed out of violence and imperialism, all told through a zany trip around the world at the erratic whims of it’s fascinating protagonist as she strings others along in her Grand Tour of Exile.
‘Love, like death and literature and liberty, is everywhere and nowhere at once.’
Zebra, the name our character has chosen for herself, is a really interesting character to follow. She is quick witted, well read and speaks effectively.
She comes from a long line of ‘Autodidacts, Anarchists, and Atheists’ and is very proud of her heritage. The opening prologue is worth reading alone, with a moving tale of her father smuggling her out of Iran while teaching her all he knows about life and literature along the way. It makes for a decent primer on modern Iranian history and the struggles the people have faced. Years later, after the death of her father, Zebra must figure out what to do with all her history and learning. She heads to Barcelona to retrace her journey from Iran to the US and her Grand Tour of Exile becomes an attempt to reappropriate exile, to ‘force life to dissolve its resistance toward me.’
In Zebra we find a determined woman trying to shake off the horrors of the world while also confronting them, sometimes barely keeping herself together in doing so. The book is an important look into the marginalized and oppressed who have been displaced and then further discarded, feared and are targets of aggression in the countries they seek refuge. Oloomi often examines the way characters suffering from a mental illness are perceived in literature, such as in her earlier book, the intense and introspective Fra Keeler, Azareen Van der Vliet Oloomi toys with the readers sense of empathy to lure them into the male narrator’s consciousness and self-justifications in order to confront the reader with their complicity in the narrator’s violent actions. Oloomi once again plays with this by creating a very caustic and eccentric character with Zebra. This sort of character would not be out of place in, say, a Dostoevsky or Hamsun novel (whom she often cites as influences in interviews) and she is checking the reader to see if they hold the same empathy for a disorderly protagonist when instead of a white male it is a Middle Eastern woman. Early in the novel a college girl gives Zebra a copy of Don Quixote:Which Was a Dream by Kathy Acker-- a retelling of the Don Quixote story as a woman on a quest to defeat the evil enchanters of America--which nudges the idea of how male and female characters with a mental illness have historically been addressed differently in literature. Oloomi asks if you enjoyed male characters running wild, being zany and picking fights as a point of humor, what does it say if you find Zebra, who is a reworking of these motifs, to be “unlikable”?
This appears in her interactions with others. The love interest of the novel, Ludo Bembo, is quick to shout at her for her actions and ideas but instead of offering her support or finding avenues to productively address her mental health he is simply content to just have sex with her. The relationship is indeed dysfunctional but Ludo seems to pile all of that on her inability to open up to him. Zebra has envisioned a ‘Pyramid of Exile’, to which Ludo himself is part of as a marginalized community in world relations, but he is, as she asserts, at the top still enjoying vast amounts of privilege and social passing that she has been denied. It is, it seems, a class system of privilege that continues to oppress those beneath them even in oppressed classes and that people will always continue to punch downward to uphold their sense of status. Zebra is desperately looking for the answers to life while Ludo just wants to sleep with her. When he becomes attached he tells her he loves her, which she mocks and blames his frustration on her inability to be vulnerable to him as if that is something she somehow owes him. Zebra, however, disagrees with this lack of agency.
This is a key motif of the novel: systemic oppression. ‘I am unafraid to admit that the world we live in is violent, obtuse; that a gulf, once opened, is not easily sealed;’ she says at one point, ‘that one does not drink from the waters of death and go on living disaffected, untouched.’ Her ‘inability’ to accept his love is not a meanness or immaturity on her part, as Ludo would have it, but a reaction to the traumas of the world. This is why so much of the “just love each other” or other well-meaning statements on setting aside differences and just being good to one another are essentially shallow and toxic: when people have been displaced from their homes by violence and then further oppressed as an “other” in their new home the idea to just set aside issues and “give in to love” becomes a way to dismiss the racism or aggression faced by some, minimize their suffering--or even chastise them for being vocal about their own oppression--for the comfort of the privileged, not the oppressed. Ludo wants Zebra to simply submit to him and ignore her suffering while Zebra is not yet done addressing her own suffering and coming to terms with what it means. ‘Am I so worthless that I am barred from taking pleasure in my own suffering?’ she wonders at one point.
‘The wheels of history are always turning and there is no knowing who will be run over next.’
Human history is filled with people displacing others and then demonizing them for their displacement, furthering their oppression and Zebra is very attuned to this. Upon visiting a museum she declares ‘The New and the Old Worlds formed a single unbroken fabric stitched together willy-nilly by the blood-stained hands of white imperialists.’ For those unfamiliar, Iran has faced decades of bloodshed and struggles, all spurred on for imperialist purposes by nations such as the UK and the US--the CIA was very involved in the 1953 coup--for access to oil and economic positioning in the Middle East. Zebra makes herself a figure for all those displaced by war and other bloodshed, roaming the world trying to make sense of it’s senselessness and make a space for the exiled. No matter where she goes she cannot find a space for herself. When an American police officer is suspicious of her behavior she shouts at him ‘Keep on bombing Iraq and invading Afghanistan, strangling the region, and there will be more of us here!’ This is nearly parodied later in the novel when, broken down by her fights with Ludo and inability to find peace in the world, she shows up on his doorstep, invites herself in and begins to live in his apartment (much to his dismay, though he quickly begins sleeping with her again). While this might be alarming to readers as clearly an abusive relationship, it is a fairly functional metaphor for how the US military destabilizes a region and then becomes resistant to the idea of accepting refugees fleeing the very devastation they imposed.
‘The buried don’t remain buried for long. They turn into flowers, fertilize our food. They nurture us even as we are haunted by them.’
Returning to the mental health aspects of the novel, it can--and is likely intended to--be read two ways. Zebra is often visited by the ghost of her father, which is done in a way where the two interact and make it appear to be an aspect of magical realism. However, it might also be an indication of her mental state. This is a common tactic in a lot of classic literature, even Shakespeare invoked ghosts when necessary for plot purposes. And a lot of depth is already brought to play when incorporating ghosts visiting a character, such as showing the influence of heritage as part of who they are as is apparent with Zebra. Oloomi very tactfully uses the way characters perceive Zebra to be suffering as a metaphor for exile and displacement while also leaning in to the fact that refugees have higher rates of psychological distress.
This is something Zebra herself is aware of and late in the novel creates a group called the ‘Pilgrims of the Void’ in order to try and help fellow exiles find their way in the world. As would be expected by this point in the novel, what proceeds is comical misadventure and blunder--much of it being openly berated and mocked by Ludo--but there is a tender heart to it all. Zebra tries to pass on her ‘literary womb’ she was born in as taught to her by her own father in order to aid others in their paths. ‘The literature produced by exiles [is designed to] objectify and lend dignity to a condition designed to deny dignity,’ she tells them, quoting social theorist Edward Said. ‘By transcribing the literature of such writers,’ she teaches, ‘we will be restoring dignity not only to literature but also to ourselves.’ This is a beautiful sentiment that echos the messages of Roberto Bolaño where literature both is of supreme importance but also not at all. It is to the oppressed that literature becomes a path of salvation, but in the hands of the privileged it is just a silly hobby and Zebra wants to reclaim literature for the beaten and the damned as a way forward in creating a space for those who lack it.
‘Life is bitter, time remorseless, and people remain civilized only so long as their own needs aren’t threatened. Not a second longer. They will suck the marrow out of your bones if you let them.’
Call Me Zebra is a brilliantly constructed and impressively written work on exile and the effects of colonialism and imperialism that makes it fit well into the literature of exiles it upholds in the book. Dark yet darkly comic, Zebra is a fascinating character who is so engaging and her love for literature is infectious. It is extra rewarding for those familiar with the variety of authors and philosophers she frequently quotes--flip to any random page and you are likely to find a quotation. Oloomi is an expert at toying with the reader and making them confront their own biases, especially ones related to literary norms, and her prose styling here is fantastic and never falters. For the exiles, the oppressed and the bibliophiles, Call Me Zebra is a treat.
4.5/5
‘That's life. You travel the world over, aimless, friendless, adrift. Then suddenly you find another rodent who shares the sorrows of your juiced organs.’
To disappear into literature seems a vacation to many, but in Call Me Zebra, the second novel by Azareen Van der Vliet Oloomi, this is a defense against the traumas of the world. Zebra is the story of a young woman with an immense passion for literature who is carrying the scars of a long history of violence and displacement and how she sets out on a literary ‘Grand Tour of Exile’ to better understand her lack of place in the world. Having escaped Iran with her father during the revolution, she has grown up as an “other” in the United States just post-9/11 where having been driven from her home has marked her as a threat in the eyes of Americans. Her father imposed a strict diet of literature and she believes the keys to understanding all reality is in the Matrix of Literature she has created in her memory. Marvelously intelligent, well-read and eccentric, Zebra is a character that often grates on those around her, people who find it easier to dismiss her instead of understand that she is a product of the worst parts of humanity and struggling to find her way in a world that has tried to snuff her out and deny her space within it. Admittedly this is not a book that will vibe with everyone due to its very effective yet affected prose styling and long-winded ponderings on literature as well as the eccentricities of narrative itself, but for those who do connect this is a really rewarding work. This one really worked for me. Call Me Zebra is a brilliant and darkly-comedic exploration of exile, literature, victimization and the framework of human history constructed out of violence and imperialism, all told through a zany trip around the world at the erratic whims of it’s fascinating protagonist as she strings others along in her Grand Tour of Exile.
‘Love, like death and literature and liberty, is everywhere and nowhere at once.’
Zebra, the name our character has chosen for herself, is a really interesting character to follow. She is quick witted, well read and speaks effectively.
‘I told him that I speak directly because in order to stay alive I must always work to make up for the time I’ve lost due to the fact that, as an ill-fated citizen of this negligible world, I am subjected to being constantly attacked by history and that I have been trained by my literary-minded ancestors to cobmat the dulling effects of the psychic and emotional wounds caused by these violent attacks with verbal efficiency.’
She comes from a long line of ‘Autodidacts, Anarchists, and Atheists’ and is very proud of her heritage. The opening prologue is worth reading alone, with a moving tale of her father smuggling her out of Iran while teaching her all he knows about life and literature along the way. It makes for a decent primer on modern Iranian history and the struggles the people have faced. Years later, after the death of her father, Zebra must figure out what to do with all her history and learning. She heads to Barcelona to retrace her journey from Iran to the US and her Grand Tour of Exile becomes an attempt to reappropriate exile, to ‘force life to dissolve its resistance toward me.’
“I, Zebra, am recrossing borders I have already crossed in order to map the literature of the void and prove once and for all that any thought worth preserving in our pitiable human record was manifested in the mind of an exile, an immigrant, a refugee...persons fleeing from persecution, and/or otherwise homeless beings.’
In Zebra we find a determined woman trying to shake off the horrors of the world while also confronting them, sometimes barely keeping herself together in doing so. The book is an important look into the marginalized and oppressed who have been displaced and then further discarded, feared and are targets of aggression in the countries they seek refuge. Oloomi often examines the way characters suffering from a mental illness are perceived in literature, such as in her earlier book, the intense and introspective Fra Keeler, Azareen Van der Vliet Oloomi toys with the readers sense of empathy to lure them into the male narrator’s consciousness and self-justifications in order to confront the reader with their complicity in the narrator’s violent actions. Oloomi once again plays with this by creating a very caustic and eccentric character with Zebra. This sort of character would not be out of place in, say, a Dostoevsky or Hamsun novel (whom she often cites as influences in interviews) and she is checking the reader to see if they hold the same empathy for a disorderly protagonist when instead of a white male it is a Middle Eastern woman. Early in the novel a college girl gives Zebra a copy of Don Quixote:Which Was a Dream by Kathy Acker-- a retelling of the Don Quixote story as a woman on a quest to defeat the evil enchanters of America--which nudges the idea of how male and female characters with a mental illness have historically been addressed differently in literature. Oloomi asks if you enjoyed male characters running wild, being zany and picking fights as a point of humor, what does it say if you find Zebra, who is a reworking of these motifs, to be “unlikable”?
This appears in her interactions with others. The love interest of the novel, Ludo Bembo, is quick to shout at her for her actions and ideas but instead of offering her support or finding avenues to productively address her mental health he is simply content to just have sex with her. The relationship is indeed dysfunctional but Ludo seems to pile all of that on her inability to open up to him. Zebra has envisioned a ‘Pyramid of Exile’, to which Ludo himself is part of as a marginalized community in world relations, but he is, as she asserts, at the top still enjoying vast amounts of privilege and social passing that she has been denied. It is, it seems, a class system of privilege that continues to oppress those beneath them even in oppressed classes and that people will always continue to punch downward to uphold their sense of status. Zebra is desperately looking for the answers to life while Ludo just wants to sleep with her. When he becomes attached he tells her he loves her, which she mocks and blames his frustration on her inability to be vulnerable to him as if that is something she somehow owes him. Zebra, however, disagrees with this lack of agency.
’I have been pushed by the world into a state of psychic feudalism and you want me to make myself vulnerable to you. How much vulnerability do you think one person can take? Do you want me to rip my skin off and stand in the wind, bleeding and raw?’
This is a key motif of the novel: systemic oppression. ‘I am unafraid to admit that the world we live in is violent, obtuse; that a gulf, once opened, is not easily sealed;’ she says at one point, ‘that one does not drink from the waters of death and go on living disaffected, untouched.’ Her ‘inability’ to accept his love is not a meanness or immaturity on her part, as Ludo would have it, but a reaction to the traumas of the world. This is why so much of the “just love each other” or other well-meaning statements on setting aside differences and just being good to one another are essentially shallow and toxic: when people have been displaced from their homes by violence and then further oppressed as an “other” in their new home the idea to just set aside issues and “give in to love” becomes a way to dismiss the racism or aggression faced by some, minimize their suffering--or even chastise them for being vocal about their own oppression--for the comfort of the privileged, not the oppressed. Ludo wants Zebra to simply submit to him and ignore her suffering while Zebra is not yet done addressing her own suffering and coming to terms with what it means. ‘Am I so worthless that I am barred from taking pleasure in my own suffering?’ she wonders at one point.
‘The wheels of history are always turning and there is no knowing who will be run over next.’
Human history is filled with people displacing others and then demonizing them for their displacement, furthering their oppression and Zebra is very attuned to this. Upon visiting a museum she declares ‘The New and the Old Worlds formed a single unbroken fabric stitched together willy-nilly by the blood-stained hands of white imperialists.’ For those unfamiliar, Iran has faced decades of bloodshed and struggles, all spurred on for imperialist purposes by nations such as the UK and the US--the CIA was very involved in the 1953 coup--for access to oil and economic positioning in the Middle East. Zebra makes herself a figure for all those displaced by war and other bloodshed, roaming the world trying to make sense of it’s senselessness and make a space for the exiled. No matter where she goes she cannot find a space for herself. When an American police officer is suspicious of her behavior she shouts at him ‘Keep on bombing Iraq and invading Afghanistan, strangling the region, and there will be more of us here!’ This is nearly parodied later in the novel when, broken down by her fights with Ludo and inability to find peace in the world, she shows up on his doorstep, invites herself in and begins to live in his apartment (much to his dismay, though he quickly begins sleeping with her again). While this might be alarming to readers as clearly an abusive relationship, it is a fairly functional metaphor for how the US military destabilizes a region and then becomes resistant to the idea of accepting refugees fleeing the very devastation they imposed.
‘The buried don’t remain buried for long. They turn into flowers, fertilize our food. They nurture us even as we are haunted by them.’
Returning to the mental health aspects of the novel, it can--and is likely intended to--be read two ways. Zebra is often visited by the ghost of her father, which is done in a way where the two interact and make it appear to be an aspect of magical realism. However, it might also be an indication of her mental state. This is a common tactic in a lot of classic literature, even Shakespeare invoked ghosts when necessary for plot purposes. And a lot of depth is already brought to play when incorporating ghosts visiting a character, such as showing the influence of heritage as part of who they are as is apparent with Zebra. Oloomi very tactfully uses the way characters perceive Zebra to be suffering as a metaphor for exile and displacement while also leaning in to the fact that refugees have higher rates of psychological distress.
This is something Zebra herself is aware of and late in the novel creates a group called the ‘Pilgrims of the Void’ in order to try and help fellow exiles find their way in the world. As would be expected by this point in the novel, what proceeds is comical misadventure and blunder--much of it being openly berated and mocked by Ludo--but there is a tender heart to it all. Zebra tries to pass on her ‘literary womb’ she was born in as taught to her by her own father in order to aid others in their paths. ‘The literature produced by exiles [is designed to] objectify and lend dignity to a condition designed to deny dignity,’ she tells them, quoting social theorist Edward Said. ‘By transcribing the literature of such writers,’ she teaches, ‘we will be restoring dignity not only to literature but also to ourselves.’ This is a beautiful sentiment that echos the messages of Roberto Bolaño where literature both is of supreme importance but also not at all. It is to the oppressed that literature becomes a path of salvation, but in the hands of the privileged it is just a silly hobby and Zebra wants to reclaim literature for the beaten and the damned as a way forward in creating a space for those who lack it.
‘Life is bitter, time remorseless, and people remain civilized only so long as their own needs aren’t threatened. Not a second longer. They will suck the marrow out of your bones if you let them.’
Call Me Zebra is a brilliantly constructed and impressively written work on exile and the effects of colonialism and imperialism that makes it fit well into the literature of exiles it upholds in the book. Dark yet darkly comic, Zebra is a fascinating character who is so engaging and her love for literature is infectious. It is extra rewarding for those familiar with the variety of authors and philosophers she frequently quotes--flip to any random page and you are likely to find a quotation. Oloomi is an expert at toying with the reader and making them confront their own biases, especially ones related to literary norms, and her prose styling here is fantastic and never falters. For the exiles, the oppressed and the bibliophiles, Call Me Zebra is a treat.
4.5/5
‘That's life. You travel the world over, aimless, friendless, adrift. Then suddenly you find another rodent who shares the sorrows of your juiced organs.’
March 8, 2019
It's been quite some time since I've visited One Star Island but, thanks to Van der Vliet Oloomi, I just received a visa.
"When I found the street, I pointed at it and simultaneously tapped my foot against the ground in order to indicate to the various intersecting surfaces of the city that I, Zebra, Dame of the Void, was as receptive as an antenna, ready to channel information; that my double mind, which contained multiple subminds, each motored by a different language, was a fertile ground for receiving signals from the palimpsest of time that is, it goes without saying, contained within the Matrix of Literature."
It was at this point that I bit the cyanide capsule.
Pompous and grandiose, this book was a trial to absorb. It seems we are meant to embrace the eponymous Zebra as a New World Don Quixote. All the author really delivers is another Alonso Quijano as seen by his neighbors, niece, and Sanson Carrasco. On the evidence of the writing quality, and the multiple incisive literary allusions contained in this novel, it's clear Van der Vliet Oloomi is an intelligent young woman. Why she would choose to spend her energies creating something like this is mystifying.
"When I found the street, I pointed at it and simultaneously tapped my foot against the ground in order to indicate to the various intersecting surfaces of the city that I, Zebra, Dame of the Void, was as receptive as an antenna, ready to channel information; that my double mind, which contained multiple subminds, each motored by a different language, was a fertile ground for receiving signals from the palimpsest of time that is, it goes without saying, contained within the Matrix of Literature."
It was at this point that I bit the cyanide capsule.
Pompous and grandiose, this book was a trial to absorb. It seems we are meant to embrace the eponymous Zebra as a New World Don Quixote. All the author really delivers is another Alonso Quijano as seen by his neighbors, niece, and Sanson Carrasco. On the evidence of the writing quality, and the multiple incisive literary allusions contained in this novel, it's clear Van der Vliet Oloomi is an intelligent young woman. Why she would choose to spend her energies creating something like this is mystifying.
March 5, 2018
Pretentious writing style obscured what would otherwise have been a really touching story about a young woman coping with tragedy and growing up. Currently, I prefer to read authors who can communicate universal topics in simple, yet beautiful, ways. Van der Vilet Oloomi seemed more concerned with clogging up every sentence with literary references and a superiority complex rather than using language to convey the narrative. Regardless of whether that was the point of the book, I did not enjoy it. Others might like this type of writing style, but I found it arduous.
February 23, 2019
I spent most of this novel trying to get into Zebra's headspace and empathize with her. I am not sure if I achieved these aims as the majority of the time I vacillated between thinking Zebra was either an obnoxious ass or that she was bat shit crazy. Certainly there is dysfunction there. My heart went out to her and her father during their exile from Iran - burying her mother with their bare hands, removing clothes from ravaged decomposing bodies, the garments of the dead providing protection from the elements and Saddam's regime. After this no one expects her to be sane. Although I understand that Van Der Vliet Oloomi's goal was to provide us with a narrative of immigrant disorientation or as she calls it a "psychosis of exile", I believe her aim was lost behind her prose. As a bibliophile I should have been in heaven with all of the references to works of literature. Instead, I found the unusual usage of vocabulary forced and Zebra's diatribes off-putting. Overall it makes the book come off as pretentious. For those interested in a moving narrative of exile I would recommend Négar Djavadi's Disoriental instead.
April 18, 2018
you either get this or you don't. it's better if you do. zebra is unconsciously unironic. she is both an unquestionable victim of exile and tragedy and an illicit manufacturer of drama. she is miserably elitist, but masterfully hyperbolic and communicative of a bestial, guarded, unstable femininity. she is impossible and outrageously capricious, an erratic and unrestrained lover. she is anarchic, alone, but singularly vivacious and galvanized by literature and the scholarly pursuit of her suffering.
April 8, 2018
The only character I liked in this book was the bird.
March 6, 2018
3.5, rounded down. I find this one a tricky one to review. Van der Vliet Oloomi is a talented writer and I think she may very well be a genius - if not a genius, certainly incredibly whip smart and well read. Her main character and narrator, Bibi Abbas Abbas Hosseini (aka Zebra) shares these same qualities - smart, well read. Unfortunately, Zebra is also frequently maddening, frustrating, annoying and possibly crazy. I didn't hate her, but neither was she an altogether likable character. In fairness to the character der Vliet Oloomi has created, Zebra did experience a horrifying journey when exiled from Iran at an early age. She is a damaged character. Sadly, for this reader, damaged but irritatingly so. I just wanted to tell her to "Snap out of it."
This is a somewhat challenging read and its slow pace (it did gather some steam towards the end) accounted for it not being a particularly enjoyable read, despite some comic moments in the absurdist tradition. Despite my criticism, this is still an intelligent novel using literature and literary theory as Zebra retraces her Iranian exile. A book I admired far more than I enjoyed.
This is a somewhat challenging read and its slow pace (it did gather some steam towards the end) accounted for it not being a particularly enjoyable read, despite some comic moments in the absurdist tradition. Despite my criticism, this is still an intelligent novel using literature and literary theory as Zebra retraces her Iranian exile. A book I admired far more than I enjoyed.
April 6, 2018
What did I just read? Why did I read it? What in me convinced me that I should persist and keep turning virtual pages and read on? I have no answers to any of those questions. I think I wasted my time reading this book and trying to figure it out.
It's a book about immigrant girl and her father, they both left their home country and after hardships and troubles arrive in the New World. But it's not a 'normal' story. Main character is coming from a family of self-proclaimed anarchists, atheists, and autodidacts, who are feeding on literature, who live to transcribe words of writes before them. .1 percent is mentioned few times, that Zebra and her family belong to the .1 percent of people that accessed the higher world of literature, the Matrix of Literature as Zebra starts to call it. Zebra's sens of superiority and how judgmental she is was so annoying for me. She treats everyone she doesn't believe to be part of Pyramid of Exile and who doesn't have access to Matrix to Literature as a worse and pitiful human being. At one point she leaves New York to start her Pilgrimage of Exile. She goes to Barcelona, meets a guy there and have some kind of love-hate relationship with him. She moves in with him after some time and starts some pitiful group that she drags on some pointless pilgrimages. She's neurotic, disrespectful and weird in a way that I cannot appreciate.
Call me Zebra is probably a book with a deeper profound meaning, that I didn't found. I'm not part of the .1 percent as Zebra is, and I'm just not capable of understanding or enjoying this book. It didn't make me feel anything. I was tirelessly checking how many pages of this book is left, it was a painful experience to read it to the end. But I did it, and now I'm left with question - why, oh why did I persevere? What did I hope will happen?
It's a book about immigrant girl and her father, they both left their home country and after hardships and troubles arrive in the New World. But it's not a 'normal' story. Main character is coming from a family of self-proclaimed anarchists, atheists, and autodidacts, who are feeding on literature, who live to transcribe words of writes before them. .1 percent is mentioned few times, that Zebra and her family belong to the .1 percent of people that accessed the higher world of literature, the Matrix of Literature as Zebra starts to call it. Zebra's sens of superiority and how judgmental she is was so annoying for me. She treats everyone she doesn't believe to be part of Pyramid of Exile and who doesn't have access to Matrix to Literature as a worse and pitiful human being. At one point she leaves New York to start her Pilgrimage of Exile. She goes to Barcelona, meets a guy there and have some kind of love-hate relationship with him. She moves in with him after some time and starts some pitiful group that she drags on some pointless pilgrimages. She's neurotic, disrespectful and weird in a way that I cannot appreciate.
Call me Zebra is probably a book with a deeper profound meaning, that I didn't found. I'm not part of the .1 percent as Zebra is, and I'm just not capable of understanding or enjoying this book. It didn't make me feel anything. I was tirelessly checking how many pages of this book is left, it was a painful experience to read it to the end. But I did it, and now I'm left with question - why, oh why did I persevere? What did I hope will happen?
February 27, 2018
I was drawn to this book, I admit, because it was so highly anticipated among the most informed voices of literature. I have grown wary of expert opinions of any kind, to be honest, so I began the book, I suppose, with some skepticism that it would meet the ‘most anticipated’ status it had achieved.
And I was wrong and the experts were right. This is a remarkable book. The prose is witty and the scenes and characters are developed to balanced perfection. More than anything else, however, it’s hilarious.
When our protagonist, Zebra, is picked up at the Barcelona airport by a friend of a friend she hasn’t met, he is holding a sign that says: “Here to reclaim Jose Emilio Morale’s friend.” Instead of offering a friendly ‘hi, how are you, thanks for picking me up,’ our obsessed and behaviorally neurotic Zebra immediately demands to know if he had ever possessed her before, as the precise wording of the sign literally implies. He is Ludo Bembo, the self-exiled Italian philologist, who ultimately relents to her insistent demand by noting, “It is only a sign.” The explanation, not surprisingly, fell on deaf ears because nothing is only anything to Zebra at that time.
It admittedly reminded me of a retired English teacher I knew that was moved off her foundation whenever anyone used the phrase “very unique.” If humor is the release of discomfort, this kind of obsessive policing of language is the literary equivalent of slipping on a banana peel.
I bring that up, in part, because this is a book that could easily intimidate the reader if you let it. I don’t think, however, you need to let it, and I am convinced that the author would be greatly disappointed if you did. The author is obviously smart and capable, but the book shows no pretense of aspiration to be a literati. She wants to make you think, not back down.
The protagonist is an exile/immigrant/refugee, of course, and both the complexity of the book and the rich humor comes from her coming of age, intellectually and emotionally, in an unfamiliar and inhospitable world, having lost all of her family and personal identity to time and political tragedy.
True to her ancestral roots, she turns to literature, and the work of exiled poets and writers, in particular, as both a vehicle of escape and a source of pre-packaged judgment. And since much of her personal journey is navigated through the lens and the physical geography of literature and the geo-political history of civil war and exile in Europe and the Middle East, the narrative is filled with a bounty of references on both fronts.
Do not, however, be afraid of the literary references. You don’t need any expertise in Nietzsche or Dante to enjoy the narrative any more than you need an expertise in cars to enjoy a pleasant ride in the countryside.
The coming of age I refer to, which would be more appropriately called the coming of self, is a process of awareness followed by accumulation. At the peak of the process we are likely to be filled to overflowing with angst, disillusionment, and, perhaps, self-pity, if not self-loathing. Ultimately, however, we find a way to sort it all out and not to discharge our burden, but to clean things up enough to make room for the burdens of others.
That sorting, prioritizing, and contextualizing of her personal and ancestral burden is the heart of the storyline. It is a journey of self-discovery and the reconciliation of identity that we all must take. While told in the rich context of literature and art, it is, therefore, the most common story of all. It is, however, the rich and unique context that allows this story to stand out; to be both zany and personal at the same time.
The key, I think, is to let the story come to you and not to spend too much time trying to digest and consider each and every literary reference. I was reminded of those little rubber balls that seem to accelerate each time they bounce. They’re much easier to catch if you wait until the end of each bounce to reach for them.
Which is why, I suggest, if you are considering this book you just dive in and give it a go. If this book is not a national best seller it will be because of intimidation, not the quality of the story or the prose. You won’t find much better.
The best news is that, in my own experience (I am now a sexagenarian), the first peak of self-awareness typically proves to be a foothill. Life is a range, not a mountain. So perhaps we shall have the benefit of scaling yet another peak of self-discovery with Zebra and her literary burden in the future. I truly look forward to it.
And I was wrong and the experts were right. This is a remarkable book. The prose is witty and the scenes and characters are developed to balanced perfection. More than anything else, however, it’s hilarious.
When our protagonist, Zebra, is picked up at the Barcelona airport by a friend of a friend she hasn’t met, he is holding a sign that says: “Here to reclaim Jose Emilio Morale’s friend.” Instead of offering a friendly ‘hi, how are you, thanks for picking me up,’ our obsessed and behaviorally neurotic Zebra immediately demands to know if he had ever possessed her before, as the precise wording of the sign literally implies. He is Ludo Bembo, the self-exiled Italian philologist, who ultimately relents to her insistent demand by noting, “It is only a sign.” The explanation, not surprisingly, fell on deaf ears because nothing is only anything to Zebra at that time.
It admittedly reminded me of a retired English teacher I knew that was moved off her foundation whenever anyone used the phrase “very unique.” If humor is the release of discomfort, this kind of obsessive policing of language is the literary equivalent of slipping on a banana peel.
I bring that up, in part, because this is a book that could easily intimidate the reader if you let it. I don’t think, however, you need to let it, and I am convinced that the author would be greatly disappointed if you did. The author is obviously smart and capable, but the book shows no pretense of aspiration to be a literati. She wants to make you think, not back down.
The protagonist is an exile/immigrant/refugee, of course, and both the complexity of the book and the rich humor comes from her coming of age, intellectually and emotionally, in an unfamiliar and inhospitable world, having lost all of her family and personal identity to time and political tragedy.
True to her ancestral roots, she turns to literature, and the work of exiled poets and writers, in particular, as both a vehicle of escape and a source of pre-packaged judgment. And since much of her personal journey is navigated through the lens and the physical geography of literature and the geo-political history of civil war and exile in Europe and the Middle East, the narrative is filled with a bounty of references on both fronts.
Do not, however, be afraid of the literary references. You don’t need any expertise in Nietzsche or Dante to enjoy the narrative any more than you need an expertise in cars to enjoy a pleasant ride in the countryside.
The coming of age I refer to, which would be more appropriately called the coming of self, is a process of awareness followed by accumulation. At the peak of the process we are likely to be filled to overflowing with angst, disillusionment, and, perhaps, self-pity, if not self-loathing. Ultimately, however, we find a way to sort it all out and not to discharge our burden, but to clean things up enough to make room for the burdens of others.
That sorting, prioritizing, and contextualizing of her personal and ancestral burden is the heart of the storyline. It is a journey of self-discovery and the reconciliation of identity that we all must take. While told in the rich context of literature and art, it is, therefore, the most common story of all. It is, however, the rich and unique context that allows this story to stand out; to be both zany and personal at the same time.
The key, I think, is to let the story come to you and not to spend too much time trying to digest and consider each and every literary reference. I was reminded of those little rubber balls that seem to accelerate each time they bounce. They’re much easier to catch if you wait until the end of each bounce to reach for them.
Which is why, I suggest, if you are considering this book you just dive in and give it a go. If this book is not a national best seller it will be because of intimidation, not the quality of the story or the prose. You won’t find much better.
The best news is that, in my own experience (I am now a sexagenarian), the first peak of self-awareness typically proves to be a foothill. Life is a range, not a mountain. So perhaps we shall have the benefit of scaling yet another peak of self-discovery with Zebra and her literary burden in the future. I truly look forward to it.
December 12, 2024
This novel found its way to my reading list because it won the PEN/Faulkner award for fiction in 2019. It is rated rather low on Goodreads, but sometimes I come across gems, at least for me, in this way. This novel could be described as experimental, metafiction, magic realism or some combination of the three. I have loved and disliked novels that fall into one or more of these categories, so these tags did not dissuade me.
In Call Me Zebra, a young woman, who chooses the name Zebra for herself, is exiled, along with her parents, from Iran and then loses her mother and eventually her father. The story is about Zebra’s attempts to cope with these losses and create a life for herself.
I was disappointed with both the prose and characters. The prose is stilted and wordy. Much of the conflict and turmoil in the novel takes place in Zebra’s head. She will develop a solution or find a resolution, but then it doesn’t work out and we are back for another round of mental gymnastics. While the story is admirable and feels important, I wondered if the author and the character really wanted to find an answer. Zebra is represented as very intelligent, but she seems to consistently ignore the simplest solutions to her problems. I did not like any of the characters, except the bird, but I didn’t hate any of them either.
I came very close to giving this novel a single star. I can’t remember when I last did that. However, the author is both intelligent and gifted; I felt she attempted something unique. It just didn’t work for me. I could see her using her abilities to craft something different that might be much more appealing to me.
In Call Me Zebra, a young woman, who chooses the name Zebra for herself, is exiled, along with her parents, from Iran and then loses her mother and eventually her father. The story is about Zebra’s attempts to cope with these losses and create a life for herself.
I was disappointed with both the prose and characters. The prose is stilted and wordy. Much of the conflict and turmoil in the novel takes place in Zebra’s head. She will develop a solution or find a resolution, but then it doesn’t work out and we are back for another round of mental gymnastics. While the story is admirable and feels important, I wondered if the author and the character really wanted to find an answer. Zebra is represented as very intelligent, but she seems to consistently ignore the simplest solutions to her problems. I did not like any of the characters, except the bird, but I didn’t hate any of them either.
I came very close to giving this novel a single star. I can’t remember when I last did that. However, the author is both intelligent and gifted; I felt she attempted something unique. It just didn’t work for me. I could see her using her abilities to craft something different that might be much more appealing to me.
February 7, 2019
I will frequently use this book to tell the future/make decisions in a Zebraesque style by pacing my halls while reading random sentences about the void aloud to my dog. Five stars! However, I recommend this book to nobody else.
When the book became all about love, I kept thinking "Zebra, cut it out! Love is a trap created by the patriarchy to squash your inner void! Run away and talk to more grocers. Show more strangers your mobile art exhibit made of your father's coffin (which is really a suitcase). Put your gas mask back on and eat more books. Be an anarchist! An autodidact! An atheist! COME ON!"
This is hard for me to rate because I loved the character, loved the style, but did not love the story arc. My inner voice sounds a lot like Zebra (and if I have a glass of wine, my outer voice sounds like her too). I just wish she wouldn't have gotten tied up with Ludo! Why did this book about an awesome independent thinker become a book about love and a man? 1 Star for the love story. Ugh.
I will NOT let Ludo drag this book down for me. I will forget him completely as of right now. Take that MEN!
When the book became all about love, I kept thinking "Zebra, cut it out! Love is a trap created by the patriarchy to squash your inner void! Run away and talk to more grocers. Show more strangers your mobile art exhibit made of your father's coffin (which is really a suitcase). Put your gas mask back on and eat more books. Be an anarchist! An autodidact! An atheist! COME ON!"
This is hard for me to rate because I loved the character, loved the style, but did not love the story arc. My inner voice sounds a lot like Zebra (and if I have a glass of wine, my outer voice sounds like her too). I just wish she wouldn't have gotten tied up with Ludo! Why did this book about an awesome independent thinker become a book about love and a man? 1 Star for the love story. Ugh.
I will NOT let Ludo drag this book down for me. I will forget him completely as of right now. Take that MEN!
January 12, 2019
I'm predisposed to like a book on the power of literature with a protagonist who loves books, but I hated this. Pretentious, repetitive, and poorly written. Don't understand the critical acclaim for this novel.
December 5, 2018
Odysseus.
Quixote.
Zebra.
This young lady, a child, from my perspective, wrote a great novel, really.
Somehow, it reminds me of Paul and John and George, and their earlier works. How could three young boys from Liverpool create such ‘depth of life’ tunes at twenty-five?
Back to Avvo (if you allow the acronym to refer to the author).
A descendant of Iranian painters, intellectuals, and poets who considered themselves ‘autodidacts, atheists, and anarchists,’ a badge I would and do proudly wear (the aaa part), is part of the context of this writer’s background.
There are numerous literary references within the story, some of my faves; Walter Benjamin, Nietzsche, Goethe.
The protagonist, a twenty-something unfiltered, exiled savant, is, at times, quite funny, in a pugilistic word sense. Which, kind of makes her more adorable.
Zebra begins in Iran but moves to America, to Catalonia, to Italy. But wandering is a Semitic (in reference to the entire middle east) gene and cannot be overcome. And she is on a mission, like all of us, only we never really know to where.
It recalls a book I read a decade or so ago, Le Grand Meaulnes, by Alain-Fournier. In this book, I was unable to describe what I liked about it. I am, unfortunately, equally inarticulate here.
Adored the cadence of Avvo’s prose. A tinge of philosophy, also.
Surprised, to say the least, at her dexterity with the lexicon, in ‘A Clockwork Orange’ sort of way.
The reader imagines, big time, the way she perambulates the empty pages like one of the old masters, and then populates it as well as they did in their day.
Bottom line;
One. Great. Book. (Imo)
Quixote.
Zebra.
This young lady, a child, from my perspective, wrote a great novel, really.
Somehow, it reminds me of Paul and John and George, and their earlier works. How could three young boys from Liverpool create such ‘depth of life’ tunes at twenty-five?
Back to Avvo (if you allow the acronym to refer to the author).
A descendant of Iranian painters, intellectuals, and poets who considered themselves ‘autodidacts, atheists, and anarchists,’ a badge I would and do proudly wear (the aaa part), is part of the context of this writer’s background.
There are numerous literary references within the story, some of my faves; Walter Benjamin, Nietzsche, Goethe.
The protagonist, a twenty-something unfiltered, exiled savant, is, at times, quite funny, in a pugilistic word sense. Which, kind of makes her more adorable.
Zebra begins in Iran but moves to America, to Catalonia, to Italy. But wandering is a Semitic (in reference to the entire middle east) gene and cannot be overcome. And she is on a mission, like all of us, only we never really know to where.
It recalls a book I read a decade or so ago, Le Grand Meaulnes, by Alain-Fournier. In this book, I was unable to describe what I liked about it. I am, unfortunately, equally inarticulate here.
Adored the cadence of Avvo’s prose. A tinge of philosophy, also.
Surprised, to say the least, at her dexterity with the lexicon, in ‘A Clockwork Orange’ sort of way.
The reader imagines, big time, the way she perambulates the empty pages like one of the old masters, and then populates it as well as they did in their day.
Bottom line;
One. Great. Book. (Imo)
February 22, 2018
Zebra, the narrator, is a young Iranian refugee who decides to explore her roots after the death of her parents. She aspires to fully inherit her family’s “treasured roles” of Autodidacts, Anarchists, and Atheists. She is a deeply infuriating, unsentimental, hopelessly pretentious character obsessed with being a “literary terrorist.” And yet the book is very funny in a self-aware, pretentious way that quotes and mashes up lots of great literature.
February 3, 2019
‘Zebra: an animal striped bland-and-white like a prisoner of war; an animal that rejects all binaries that represents ink on paper. A martyr of though. That was it. I had arrive at my new name. To the funeral director’s astonishment, I declared out loud, “Call me Zebra!”’
Zebra is a young woman who decides to retrace her journey from Iran to the U.S. after the death of her father. She is the last in a long line of self-proclaimed Iranian autodidacts, anarchists and atheists whose motto is “In this false world, we guard our lives with our deaths”. Her odyssey stalls, however, in Barcelona where she develops an love/hate relationship with an Italian academic and a cockatoo named Taüt. Her father’s ghost is a welcome companion as she develops her theories on exile and death.
This novel was absolutely and purposefully absurd. I was strongly reminded of A Confederacy of Dunces while reading it. For the record, I didn’t like A Confederacy of Dunces. But the author Oloomi takes her obnoxious, self-absorbed protagonist to a whole new level. I think I understood A Confederacy of Dunces, I just don’t find flatulence funny. However, I ‘m afraid I don’t have the literary chops to appreciate Call Me Zebra. Zebra uses literature as a way of divination and navigation. There are countless literary references, mostly to author’s with whose work I am only cursorily aware: Borges, Nietzsche, Sartre, Benjamin, etc… (she does quote Dickens once!). READ FOR TOB 2019
Zebra is a young woman who decides to retrace her journey from Iran to the U.S. after the death of her father. She is the last in a long line of self-proclaimed Iranian autodidacts, anarchists and atheists whose motto is “In this false world, we guard our lives with our deaths”. Her odyssey stalls, however, in Barcelona where she develops an love/hate relationship with an Italian academic and a cockatoo named Taüt. Her father’s ghost is a welcome companion as she develops her theories on exile and death.
This novel was absolutely and purposefully absurd. I was strongly reminded of A Confederacy of Dunces while reading it. For the record, I didn’t like A Confederacy of Dunces. But the author Oloomi takes her obnoxious, self-absorbed protagonist to a whole new level. I think I understood A Confederacy of Dunces, I just don’t find flatulence funny. However, I ‘m afraid I don’t have the literary chops to appreciate Call Me Zebra. Zebra uses literature as a way of divination and navigation. There are countless literary references, mostly to author’s with whose work I am only cursorily aware: Borges, Nietzsche, Sartre, Benjamin, etc… (she does quote Dickens once!). READ FOR TOB 2019
April 1, 2018
Why it got 2 ⭐:
⭐ For moments like this.
"What path leads to freedom? I asked. Any vein in your body, I answered..."
⭐ For the sheer bliss that came over me when I got to read the protagonist expound on powerhouse literary greats. The first third of the book was less awkward.
Why it doesn't matter if you read this book:
1. (Protagonist) Zebra = insane...and not in the cool, edgy, life affirming learn-to-face-your-demons sort of way.
2. Zebra is unlikeable. I'm tired of reading women who have incredible and fascinating niches, but who are essentially garbage humans. Cue everything after the beginning, when apparently it becomes difficult to not be an asshole.
3. Call Me Zebra = WTF?
The moral of this story is that you can be an erratic, arrogant, psychopath, stalk him after continuously upbraiding him, and he'll still have sex with you?
Umm....noooo? Maybe? I'm not so sure suddenly. Maybe things are different in Europe...
I wish it was empowering. I wish it did offer some insight. Something that wasn't an eloquent bag of crazy. Something I could utilize. Metabolize. Call into my life by learning how to call it in my own way, with Zebra as my guide through the gamut of male belletristic greats.
And yes. I did read the whole thing. Unlike Zebra, I have it within myself to be an asshole after contemptuous, not-so-cool you is presented in your entirety.
Thank you to NetGalley and Houghton Mifflin Harcourt for providing me with this ARC in exchange for an honest review.
⭐ For moments like this.
"What path leads to freedom? I asked. Any vein in your body, I answered..."
⭐ For the sheer bliss that came over me when I got to read the protagonist expound on powerhouse literary greats. The first third of the book was less awkward.
Why it doesn't matter if you read this book:
1. (Protagonist) Zebra = insane...and not in the cool, edgy, life affirming learn-to-face-your-demons sort of way.
2. Zebra is unlikeable. I'm tired of reading women who have incredible and fascinating niches, but who are essentially garbage humans. Cue everything after the beginning, when apparently it becomes difficult to not be an asshole.
3. Call Me Zebra = WTF?
The moral of this story is that you can be an erratic, arrogant, psychopath, stalk him after continuously upbraiding him, and he'll still have sex with you?
Umm....noooo? Maybe? I'm not so sure suddenly. Maybe things are different in Europe...
I wish it was empowering. I wish it did offer some insight. Something that wasn't an eloquent bag of crazy. Something I could utilize. Metabolize. Call into my life by learning how to call it in my own way, with Zebra as my guide through the gamut of male belletristic greats.
And yes. I did read the whole thing. Unlike Zebra, I have it within myself to be an asshole after contemptuous, not-so-cool you is presented in your entirety.
Thank you to NetGalley and Houghton Mifflin Harcourt for providing me with this ARC in exchange for an honest review.
January 10, 2019
DNF at 50 percent. My powers of concentration are failing me on this one, and my TBR is long and inviting, so I’m bailing. If you're really into problematic protagonists, experimental fiction and the experience of exile, you might fare better.
February 13, 2019
As a young girl, Zebra fled Iran with her father. The journey from their once comfortable, book-filled home to their eventual haven in a small New York apartment is a difficult one. After her father's death, Zebra decides to make the same journey in reverse, revisiting the places they traveled through on their way to America. Her first destination is Barcelona, where she meets an Italian professor, and changes her plans.
I've been examining my response to this book and trying to determine what factors caused me to hate it so very much. Sure, the writing was turgid and ponderous, with no noun left unmolested by a pair of adjectives, no sentence left without ample decoration, yet I love Victorian Lit, which tends towards embellished prose. Sure, the protagonist was just the worst, a self-involved pedant who spends the entirety of the novel treating others like things, stealing from them while contemptuously thinking about how much better she is than everyone else, but I do like novels about unlikeable characters, even the ones who are so without redeeming qualities that the reader spends the novel hoping to see them get what they deserve. There's a pretentiousness to the writing that feels unearned, names are dropped without much rhyme or reason, but this normally would not get more than an occasional eye-roll from me.
I don't know why I disliked this book so much. It's gotten some good reviews and, hey, it was published in the first place, so people more knowledgeable than myself clearly see something in it. Maybe read it for yourself and then come tell me what I missed.
April 21, 2021
Kitabın ilk bölümünün büyük bir kısmı muazzam başlıyor. Hatta bu bölümü okurken Goodreads puanının bu kadar düşük olmasına çok şaşırdım. Ailenin kökeni, “Zebra”nın doğumundan itibaren gelişimi, İran’dan çıkış yolculuğu ve günümüze gelen kısmında; bütün yolculuğu, acıyı ve çaresizliği size yaşatıyor. Açıkcası bu bölümden yazarın birikimini, gücünü görebiliyorsunuz. Ancak muazzam bir göç-sürgün ve isyan kitabı olacakken yazarın gösterişli yazım tercihi ve devamlı eklediği edebi referanslar ana konunun o kadar önüne geçiyor, bir anlatıdan daha çok bir ispat-gösteri metnine dönüşüyor ki yeniden hikayeye dahil olamıyorsunuz. Yazarın yeteneğini görüp, aynı şekilde bu yeteneğini neden bir kitaba bu kadar yoğun bir sıkıştırma yaparak göstermek istediğini anlamadığım kitaplardan.
June 4, 2018
Well, that was exhausting. There was something there, other people seem to have enjoyed it, I kept reading it far beyond the what I would have thought was the limit of my tolerance, but I didn’t get anything out of it.
Zebra is Bibi Abbas Abbas Hosseini, who comes from a long line of Autodidacts, Anarchists and Atheists, more literally from Iran, into the middle of a revolution. Her father feeds her a steady diet of literature and his own brand of philosophy and one day flees Iran with her mother and her, on the back of a donkey. Before making it past the border they lose the donkey and her mother and from then on it’s just the dad inflicting his madness on his daughter. When the novel begins, Bibi is facing her father’s imminent death. Once he dies, she embarks on what she calls a Pilgrimage of Exile, having changed her name to Zebra, Dame of the Void.
Cut to Barcelona and her pilgrimage quickly becomes derailed, because she meets a philologist by name Ludo, and they spend long hours having sex and quoting selected literature at each other, mainly to wound. It’s a toxic relationship, Zebra seems to recognize that and seems to want to perpetuate it. To that end she follows him home after he has left her in the middle of her suicide attempt, starts up a sort of a pilgrimage club with other misfits, and generally makes life hell for both herself and for Ludo. Ludo repeatedly leaves her, she repeatedly pursues him, and when Ludo inevitably succumbs to her and claims to love her, she throws that right back at him.
I’m sorry for both these characters and for those who had the bad luck to encounter them, both within the novel and outside of it - namely me. Actually, mostly I’m sorry for myself. Being a literary terrorist is all very well, although I don’t even know what the hell it means, because the lady accomplishes so little despite claims to grandeur bordering on megalomania, but one of my main questions at the end of it is, is this book in support of literature or against it? Zebra, despite having memorized weighty tomes, despite having instant recollection, shows no empathy. This is true beyond the confines of her toxic relationship with Ludo, it’s in her every interaction with another human being. So what has literature done for her? She’s done nothing for it herself - regurgitating quotes randomly from other, better, writers as a form of patchwork philosophy doesn’t qualify, does it? She needs help - she’s had a traumatic childhood, what seems like a very isolated upbringing and now she is processing her father’s death - at the very least she’s suffering from depression. Other people seem to glancingly understand this, but instead of sending her to therapy, they seem to either foot the bill for her expensive pilgrimage or get in bed with her. Are these people even pretending to be real?
I acknowledge there could be another layer to this whole thing, a subtext I missed because I was busy trying to get through the book. Her entire epiphany at the end of the book was that she doesn’t love because everything she loved disappeared. It felt paltry, because she’s still crazy, she’s still dreaming of a Ludo who doesn’t exist outside of her head and of course, she’s still stalking him. She’s still very much in the middle tier of the pyramid of exiles, and her thoughts on seeing the people next to her in the boat that’s carrying her to Genoa is that they haven’t lived. How patronizing - how would she know about anyone else’s life or the depths of another person’s grief. One would think that this is what literature would afford - an ability to put oneself in another’s shoes or at least be aware that there are others in the universe besides yourself - but it seems that even in the end, this seems to be lost on her.
It bugged me. I also bored me, which was worse. In any case, it’s done. Maybe people with a better sense of both literature and philosophy will have a better time of it. I hope.
Zebra is Bibi Abbas Abbas Hosseini, who comes from a long line of Autodidacts, Anarchists and Atheists, more literally from Iran, into the middle of a revolution. Her father feeds her a steady diet of literature and his own brand of philosophy and one day flees Iran with her mother and her, on the back of a donkey. Before making it past the border they lose the donkey and her mother and from then on it’s just the dad inflicting his madness on his daughter. When the novel begins, Bibi is facing her father’s imminent death. Once he dies, she embarks on what she calls a Pilgrimage of Exile, having changed her name to Zebra, Dame of the Void.
Cut to Barcelona and her pilgrimage quickly becomes derailed, because she meets a philologist by name Ludo, and they spend long hours having sex and quoting selected literature at each other, mainly to wound. It’s a toxic relationship, Zebra seems to recognize that and seems to want to perpetuate it. To that end she follows him home after he has left her in the middle of her suicide attempt, starts up a sort of a pilgrimage club with other misfits, and generally makes life hell for both herself and for Ludo. Ludo repeatedly leaves her, she repeatedly pursues him, and when Ludo inevitably succumbs to her and claims to love her, she throws that right back at him.
I’m sorry for both these characters and for those who had the bad luck to encounter them, both within the novel and outside of it - namely me. Actually, mostly I’m sorry for myself. Being a literary terrorist is all very well, although I don’t even know what the hell it means, because the lady accomplishes so little despite claims to grandeur bordering on megalomania, but one of my main questions at the end of it is, is this book in support of literature or against it? Zebra, despite having memorized weighty tomes, despite having instant recollection, shows no empathy. This is true beyond the confines of her toxic relationship with Ludo, it’s in her every interaction with another human being. So what has literature done for her? She’s done nothing for it herself - regurgitating quotes randomly from other, better, writers as a form of patchwork philosophy doesn’t qualify, does it? She needs help - she’s had a traumatic childhood, what seems like a very isolated upbringing and now she is processing her father’s death - at the very least she’s suffering from depression. Other people seem to glancingly understand this, but instead of sending her to therapy, they seem to either foot the bill for her expensive pilgrimage or get in bed with her. Are these people even pretending to be real?
I acknowledge there could be another layer to this whole thing, a subtext I missed because I was busy trying to get through the book. Her entire epiphany at the end of the book was that she doesn’t love because everything she loved disappeared. It felt paltry, because she’s still crazy, she’s still dreaming of a Ludo who doesn’t exist outside of her head and of course, she’s still stalking him. She’s still very much in the middle tier of the pyramid of exiles, and her thoughts on seeing the people next to her in the boat that’s carrying her to Genoa is that they haven’t lived. How patronizing - how would she know about anyone else’s life or the depths of another person’s grief. One would think that this is what literature would afford - an ability to put oneself in another’s shoes or at least be aware that there are others in the universe besides yourself - but it seems that even in the end, this seems to be lost on her.
It bugged me. I also bored me, which was worse. In any case, it’s done. Maybe people with a better sense of both literature and philosophy will have a better time of it. I hope.
This entire review has been hidden because of spoilers.
May 22, 2019
Some great passages from the book:
"'A good book...is cannibalistic. An object that calls up the ghosts of our past in order to reflect the haunting instability of our future world.'"
"'Literature is the only true form of cartography in the world.'"
"[T]he wheels of history are always turning and there is no knowing who will be run over next."
"Trust nobody and love nothing except literature, the only magnanimous host there is in this decaying world."
"Literature [...] is a nation without boundaries. It is infinite. There are no stations, no castes, no checkpoints."
"[A] country run by a buffoon is no longer a place to think."
"I had no identity and yet, I thought, I was infinite, multiple. Like a blank page, I can be whatever I want."
"'A good book...is cannibalistic. An object that calls up the ghosts of our past in order to reflect the haunting instability of our future world.'"
"'Literature is the only true form of cartography in the world.'"
"[T]he wheels of history are always turning and there is no knowing who will be run over next."
"Trust nobody and love nothing except literature, the only magnanimous host there is in this decaying world."
"Literature [...] is a nation without boundaries. It is infinite. There are no stations, no castes, no checkpoints."
"[A] country run by a buffoon is no longer a place to think."
"I had no identity and yet, I thought, I was infinite, multiple. Like a blank page, I can be whatever I want."
abandoned
April 3, 2018Can't decide if this is amazing & intelligent literature (it definitely is, in parts) or if it's too precocious for its own good. Feeling fizzled out on reading this one because the irritation is overriding the intelligence of this one.
April 26, 2018
This is an interesting look at an Iranian refugee who is interested in literature, comes to NYC, falls in love, and explores her history. There’s a lot going on in this book which keeps you thinking. Thank you NetGalley for the ARC
January 15, 2018
Call Me Zebra by Azareen Van der Vliet Oloomi is a novel from this award winning author. This is the author’s second novel.
Zebra is a 22 year old woman, born in Iran to a family who took refuge in literature from the violent present of their time. Zebra is the last of the family which describes itself as “Autodidacts, Anarchists, Atheists”, and feels responsible to hold up the family’s literary torch.
After the death of her father, Zebra decides to retrace some of the places the family has been exiled to. She meets Ludo, a famous Spanish author, also displaced, and the two find a physical and intellectual attraction to one another.
I have no idea why I chose to read this novel, I don’t like stream of consciousness narrative mode, and I have very little interest in the troubled minds of 22 year old women. That being said, I found Call Me Zebra by Azareen Van der Vliet Oloomi difficult to put down.
Almost like watching a train wreck happening and you can’t look away.
This is a sharp, yet bizarre and demented story. The protagonist is so self-absorbed in her own journey, literature and ancestors that it’s almost laughable. She expects that any moment the rest of the world would embrace her vision of reality and the “truth”.
I did enjoy the homages to some of my favorite writers, and some which I appreciate but will probably never read. The dead writers are very real to Zebra, real as any other person who spews wisdom and advice at you.
I felt that the author took a wicked pleasure in trying to challenge her audience combining geopolitics with literature.
And she’s laughing all the way to the end.
Some of the book felt like it had to be read out loud. I loved how lyrical it was, every sentence was structured to be said, not read. It’s not an easy book to skim, as this novel has to be read slowly and deliberately.
For more reviews and bookish posts please visit: http://www.ManOfLaBook.com
Zebra is a 22 year old woman, born in Iran to a family who took refuge in literature from the violent present of their time. Zebra is the last of the family which describes itself as “Autodidacts, Anarchists, Atheists”, and feels responsible to hold up the family’s literary torch.
After the death of her father, Zebra decides to retrace some of the places the family has been exiled to. She meets Ludo, a famous Spanish author, also displaced, and the two find a physical and intellectual attraction to one another.
I have no idea why I chose to read this novel, I don’t like stream of consciousness narrative mode, and I have very little interest in the troubled minds of 22 year old women. That being said, I found Call Me Zebra by Azareen Van der Vliet Oloomi difficult to put down.
Almost like watching a train wreck happening and you can’t look away.
This is a sharp, yet bizarre and demented story. The protagonist is so self-absorbed in her own journey, literature and ancestors that it’s almost laughable. She expects that any moment the rest of the world would embrace her vision of reality and the “truth”.
I did enjoy the homages to some of my favorite writers, and some which I appreciate but will probably never read. The dead writers are very real to Zebra, real as any other person who spews wisdom and advice at you.
I felt that the author took a wicked pleasure in trying to challenge her audience combining geopolitics with literature.
And she’s laughing all the way to the end.
Some of the book felt like it had to be read out loud. I loved how lyrical it was, every sentence was structured to be said, not read. It’s not an easy book to skim, as this novel has to be read slowly and deliberately.
For more reviews and bookish posts please visit: http://www.ManOfLaBook.com
March 5, 2018
I find novels about the interweaving of life and art fascinating, but Call Me Zebra felt somehow shallow, especially in the light of The Idiot by Elif Batuman, or A Line Made by Walking by Sara Baume, two profound meditations on the subject. On the plus side, I thought the refugee aspect of the story was moving, and it sure reached its climax at the end. Nonetheless, I don’t think I can handle phrases such as “the matrix of literature” or “the grand tour of exile” ever again. Maybe it was just bad timing, coming to this right after Batuman and Baume.
May 28, 2018
Incomprehensible dribbles on a page. Don’t waste your life!
January 13, 2019
Call me exasperated.
I found this book pretentious and obnoxious.
I found this book pretentious and obnoxious.
May 28, 2020
This review is based on the first 40% of the book because that's where I decided to stop reading it.
The protagonist of the book, a 22(?) year old Zebra, is what people these days would call “so extra”.
When two people approach her “for a minute of small talk”, this is what she had to say :
See what I mean with the “so extra”?
But one has to understand Zebra’s past first.
She and her parents fled from war-torn Iran when she was a child. Her father taught her several languages and read to her excessively, for he believed that literature was the only weapon against war. They both memorised books upon books from Dante to Rumi to Goethe because the mind can never be defeated.
After the death of both her parents, Zebra is consumed by a singular desire to “reverse her exile” and retrace their journey backwards towards where she was born, record the tour in a book and rediscover all her past-selves that she left behind in each of the places of her exile.
I loved the book till around here, when she reaches her first destination, Barcelona.
Zebra holds nothing but contempt for everyone else in this world and is extremely self-centered. She is so consumed by her obsessive desire to reverse her exile. She considers herself to be part of the 0.1% of the intellectual people of the world. She is oozing with literary elitism which is really unattractive. She looks at a sunset or beautiful architecture and can only think of what Dante or Homer would think of the sunset but she herself has no original thoughts whatsoever. Zebra has a one track mind and Azareen has given her no layers.
Zebra has devoured all the best books all her life, but it’s as though she has learnt zero life lessons from them. She forgets to just… live. Sees no beauty in life.
All this would still have been okay, because they paved the path to what I assumed would be a redemptive arc for Zebra, a sort of coming-of-age ending.
What really pushed me over the edge was the way the boy Ludo’s character was written into the story. The way Zebra acted around him was so not in keeping with the Zebra that was described to us for the past 50 pages - it just didn’t fit in with the rest organically. Why would Zebra, the self proclaimed sort of literary Messiah who is so obsessed with herself and her Odyssean journey let her mission be derailed by this boy? It reads really pathetic.
Azareen is a very skilled and talented writer and why she would waste her literary prowess on such a one dimensional character is beyond me. I will look out for her works in the future, but this one is not for me.
The protagonist of the book, a 22(?) year old Zebra, is what people these days would call “so extra”.
When two people approach her “for a minute of small talk”, this is what she had to say :
“I have no time for small talk! While you two expose yourself to the detrimental effects of a formal education — reduced self-knowledge, submission to authority, covert institutional indoctrination in linear time — I am employing unorthodox methods of learning in order to facilitate grand associative leaps, heightened cognition, and transcendental intellectualism, because with my father’s death fast approaching, it is my duty, as the last remaining member of the Autodidacts, Anarchists, and Atheists, to make a major philosophical intervention aimed at correcting the skewed and pitifully narrow perception of the world’s pseudo intellectuals and heretics, your erroneous brethren!”
See what I mean with the “so extra”?
But one has to understand Zebra’s past first.
She and her parents fled from war-torn Iran when she was a child. Her father taught her several languages and read to her excessively, for he believed that literature was the only weapon against war. They both memorised books upon books from Dante to Rumi to Goethe because the mind can never be defeated.
After the death of both her parents, Zebra is consumed by a singular desire to “reverse her exile” and retrace their journey backwards towards where she was born, record the tour in a book and rediscover all her past-selves that she left behind in each of the places of her exile.
I loved the book till around here, when she reaches her first destination, Barcelona.
Zebra holds nothing but contempt for everyone else in this world and is extremely self-centered. She is so consumed by her obsessive desire to reverse her exile. She considers herself to be part of the 0.1% of the intellectual people of the world. She is oozing with literary elitism which is really unattractive. She looks at a sunset or beautiful architecture and can only think of what Dante or Homer would think of the sunset but she herself has no original thoughts whatsoever. Zebra has a one track mind and Azareen has given her no layers.
Zebra has devoured all the best books all her life, but it’s as though she has learnt zero life lessons from them. She forgets to just… live. Sees no beauty in life.
All this would still have been okay, because they paved the path to what I assumed would be a redemptive arc for Zebra, a sort of coming-of-age ending.
What really pushed me over the edge was the way the boy Ludo’s character was written into the story. The way Zebra acted around him was so not in keeping with the Zebra that was described to us for the past 50 pages - it just didn’t fit in with the rest organically. Why would Zebra, the self proclaimed sort of literary Messiah who is so obsessed with herself and her Odyssean journey let her mission be derailed by this boy? It reads really pathetic.
Azareen is a very skilled and talented writer and why she would waste her literary prowess on such a one dimensional character is beyond me. I will look out for her works in the future, but this one is not for me.
January 21, 2019
Some interesting passages and the character of Zebra held some appeal, but for the most part this book was just a tedious slog.
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