Project and content management for Contemporary Authors volumes
WORK TITLE: Call Me Zebra
WORK NOTES:
PSEUDONYM(S):
BIRTHDATE:
WEBSITE: http://azareen-vandervliet.squarespace.com/
CITY:
STATE:
COUNTRY:
NATIONALITY: American
She splits her time between South Bend, Indiana and Florence, Italy. Notre Dame University Department of English 356 O’Shaughnessy Notre Dame, IN 46556 (574) 631-0477
RESEARCHER NOTES:
| LC control no.: | no2013022310 |
|---|---|
| LCCN Permalink: | https://lccn.loc.gov/no2013022310 |
| HEADING: | Van der Vliet Oloomi, Azareen |
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| 001 | 9207959 |
| 005 | 20130228073600.0 |
| 008 | 130227n| azannaabn |a aaa c |
| 010 | __ |a no2013022310 |
| 035 | __ |a (OCoLC)oca09415669 |
| 040 | __ |a NmU |b eng |c NmU |e rda |
| 053 | _0 |a PS3622.A58543 |
| 100 | 1_ |a Van der Vliet Oloomi, Azareen |
| 370 | __ |e Ind. |
| 373 | __ |a University of Notre Dame |
| 374 | __ |a writer |
| 400 | 1_ |a Vliet Oloomi, Azareen van der |
| 400 | 1_ |a Oloomi, Azareen van der Vliet |
| 670 | __ |a Fra Keeler, c2012: |b t.p. (Azareen Van der Vliet Oloomi) p. 123 (Iranian-American writer of fiction and non-fiction; MFA, Brown Univ.; teaches in MFA program at Univ. of Notre Dame; lives in Indiana) |
PERSONAL
Female.
EDUCATION:Brown University, M.F.A.
ADDRESS
CAREER
Notre Dame University, teacher.
AWARDS:Whiting Writers’’ Award, 2015; National Book Foundation “5 Under 35” honoree; MacDowell Fellowship; Fulbright Fellowship in Fiction to Catalonia, Spain.
WRITINGS
Contributor of fiction to periodicals, including Paris Review Daily, GRANTA, Guernica, BOMB, Los Angeles Review of Books Quarterly Journal, Believer, Brooklyn Rail, and Words Without Borders.
SIDELIGHTS
Iranian-American fiction and non-fiction writer Azareen Van Der Vliet Oloomi has received a MacDowell Fellowship and a Fulbright Fellowship in Fiction to Catalonia, Spain. Her work has been published in various literary sources including Paris Review Daily, Los Angeles Review of Books Quarterly Journal, and Guernica. She earned an M.F.A. from Brown University and is a teacher in the M.F.A. Program in Creative Writing at the University of Notre Dame. She has lived in Iran, Spain, the United Arab Emirates, and currently splits her time between South Bend, Indiana, and Florence, Italy.
Fra Keeler
In 2012, Oloomi wrote the critically acclaimed novel Fra Keeler, which chronicles the unraveling of a mind. In the story, an unnamed man moves into the house formerly belonging to the now deceased Fra Keeler. The new resident wants to figure out how Keeler died, yet he becomes distracted, falters in his investigation, and turns his thoughts inward. The short book proceeds slowly as the man becomes more unstable and eventually violent. Writing in Library Journal, Evelyn Beck remarked that while the conclusion is terrific, the journey there “requires a patient reader sufficiently interested in the slow unraveling of a human mind” and not readers who prefer traditional storytelling. On the other hand, a Publishers Weekly reviewer called the book a rare gem that focuses on thought processes and “offers cautions about the perils of our inner monologues.”
Admitting that the book’s focus is not about action or plot, D.H. Varma commented online at Quarterly Conversation: “Much like Pynchon’s The Crying of Lot 49, the book bottles a paranoiac atmosphere…Oloomi’s novel lodges us in the head of a paranoid lunatic and thus uncorks for us a different set of concerns.” Varma added: “The novel’s symbolic fission of literature’s fundamental building blocks helps us see textuality as both evil and necessary.”
In an interview with John Wisniewski online at Los Angeles Review of Books, Oloomi described her intent in making the book a thriller: “What I wanted was for the language in Fra Keeler to feel raw and savage in order for it to overtake the reader… If I could get the reader to identify with the singularity of the narrator’s consciousness, to be enraptured by it, then I could position the reader to question their own relationship to reality.”
Call Me Zebra
Oloomi’s next book was the highly anticipated 2018 Call Me Zebra, which follows a young woman through grief, literature, travel, and romance. After witnessing her mother’s death in Iran in the 1990s, a woman who calls herself Zebra escapes with her father to New York. Calling themselves anarchists, atheists, and autodidacts, her family takes refuge in books and the comfort of literature. When Zebra’s father dies, she is devastated and embarks on a trip back to Iran through Spain to recapture the flight of her father and to provide material for a book. In Barcelona, she meets Ludo, an Italian philologist who both excites and infuriates her. In Booklist, Bridget Thoreson describes Oloomi’s writing as extravagant and overwrought prose, however, for readers who don’t mind, the book “offers an arresting exploration of grief alongside a powder keg of a romance.”
“This is a sharp and genuinely fun picaresque, employing humor and poignancy side-by-side to tell an original and memorable story,” according to a writer in Publishers Weekly. In Kirkus Reviews, a contributor commented: “Perhaps most astonishing is that we get to revel in the intellectual formation—and emotional awakening—of a frustrating, complicated, hilarious, and, at times, deliberately annoying heroine.” Nathan Scott McNamara noted in Los Angeles Review of Books: “Call Me Zebra also features quietly devastating moments when Zebra’s emotional defenses fall away, when we are reminded that because of tyranny, war, and poverty, she has been left entirely alone to process her family’s eradication from the earth.”
BIOCRIT
PERIODICALS
Booklist, December 1, 2017, Bridget Thoreson, review of Call Me Zebra, p. 25.
Kirkus Reviews, December 15, 2017, review of Call Me Zebra.
Library Journal, October 1, 2012, Evelyn Beck, review of Fra Keeler, p. 74.
Publishers Weekly, August 27, 2012, review of Fra Keeler, p. 43; November 20, 2017, review of Call Me Zebra, p. 67.
ONLINE
Azareen Van der Vliet Oloomi Website, http://azareen-vandervliet.squarespace.com (April 1, 2018), author profile.
Los Angeles Review of Books, https://lareviewofbooks.org/ (June 18, 2015), John Wisniewski, author interview.
Quarterly Conversation, http://quarterlyconversation.com/ (March 4, 2013), D.H. Varma, review of Fra Keeler.
Azareen Van Der Vliet Oloomi is the author of Fra Keeler (Dorothy, a publishing project) and Call Me Zebra (forthcoming from Houghton Mifflin Harcourt in February 2018). 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. She splits her time between South Bend, Indiana and Florence, Italy. Fra Keeler was published in Italian by Giulio Perrone Editore in 2015.
For literary inquiries contact Kate Johnson at Wolf Literary. For media inquiries contact Stephanie Bushcardt at Houghton Mifflin Harcourt.
The National Book Foundation’s 5 Under 35, 2015
Azareen Van der Vliet Oloomi
Fra Keeler
(Dorothy, a publishing project)
Selected by Dinaw Mengestu
Azareen Van der Vliet OloomiAbout the Author
Azareen Van der Vliet Oloomi is the author of Fra Keeler. She is the recipient of a 2015 Whiting Award, a MacDowell Fellowship, and a Fulbright Fellowship to Catalonia, Spain. She has lived in Italy, Spain, Iran, the United Arab Emirates, and now resides in the USA. She teaches in the MFA Program in Creative Writing at the University of Notre Dame and splits her time between South Bend, Indiana and Florence, Italy.
Azareen Van Der Vliet Oloomi
The Mesmerizing World of Fra Keeler's Author
First we have to ask about your name. We love it. What’s the story behind it?
I was born in the United States, but I grew up in Iran, the United Arab Emirates, Spain, England and Singapore. I am of Iranian, Dutch and Scottish descent. My parents met in Tehran right before the 1979 Revolution—very inopportune timing. Their life together, and consequently mine, began under the sign of political turbulence, exile, and drift. My name bares a trace of that legacy. And I would hasten to add that this legacy has more to do with a sense of being from nowhere—something I like to explore in my writing—rather than any sense of being an “immigrant,” with one particular loss or leaving as my frame of reference.
Your current project, The Catalan Literary Landscape is an exploration of notions. A journey intersecting between landscape and literature. What are the top five landscapes that are undeniably linked to literature for specific reasons that motivate you to keep on writing and sharing your work with the world?
For me, literature is landscape. Landscape happens to be an extraordinarily mutable, dynamic surface, and one that, much like the novel, registers the passage of time. That being said, I am particularly interested in the ways that literature and landscape disappear into and mirror one another.
I felt this sense of mimicry and vanishing very strongly in Jerusalem; it is impossible to separate that landscape—which is full of wounds and sutures and bathed in a mysterious light—from the scriptures. Tuscany is another good example.
In Florence everything is an event—walking down the Lungarno, drinking wine in a plaza, getting dressed simply to sit somewhere as if on display like the statues. Florence is a relentlessly aestheticized space; it is an open-air museum. In some ways, Florence, as a singular entity, doesn’t exist, or it does, but we can’t perceive it outside of its representations in literature and art. What I see when I look at a city like Florence is a kind of kaleidoscopic after-image of its representations throughout history. What I see is a translation of a translation of a translation….a copy of a copy of a copy, or all the copies of the textures and tenors of its surfaces in an infinite regress. It’s treacherous surfaces all the way. Basically, what I am saying is: Ceci nes past Florence! We can’t be fooled.
Then there are the forbidding landscapes: deserts, or the Midwestern rustbelt with its stubborn, glacial winters.
New York, Jerusalem, Florence, Barcelona, London, Paris, Los Angeles…those are landscapes of dramatic literary proportions. I am drawn to them, but what I am most fascinated by is the palimpsest of narrative and images that obscure these very cities. I am interested in reading the city as artifice, as a novel, and vice versa: in thinking of the novel as landscape and/or architecture.
Picture
What gave you the idea to start working on Fra Keeler? What was the toughest point of the process: planning, writing, editing, getting it to the right hands or something else entirely?
When I write my head is empty. My approach to writing is intuitive, visceral. It’s difficult to descend to that space; it’s like entering a trance. I have to leave behind certainty in order to enter the dark forests of writing.
With Fra Keeler it took me a long time to find the voice. I started the book with a feeling, a mood. I chased that atmosphere for a hundred pages over the course of a summer. In the fall, I threw those pages away. They were too intellectual, I hadn’t gone down deep enough. After that, I found the voice. And once I did it was like tapping into a healthy vein. I wrote the book with my eyes closed in six-minute spurts over the course of a year. I let the voice have its way. I didn’t interfere, even if it meant sitting down in my living room blindfolded with my dog staring at me perplexed. It was later, when the book had found its shape, that I went back to comb through it sentence by sentence.
* * *
"...Just then I propped myself up on one elbow, and saw a puddle a few feet away. It had certainly rained. The fact that it had rained, and that I had suspected as much, gave me courage. I should get up, I thought, and then I thought the light from the sun is amber, even though when I was lying down it was more see-through gold, but now, propped up on my elbow, I thought to myself, I can see that it is amber, thick and dense as honeyed milk. But I couldn’t get up, despite the light and all its tricks of color, because the realization that I could go to sleep not blind and wake up blind stirred in me a severe distrust. Because when something happens once, I thought to myself, there is no telling that it will not happen again. Because that something has carved a pathway for itself in the world, regardless of consequence or prior event. As in, an event can happen without any prerequisites, which is to say that one can go to sleep not blind and wake up blind. Which is to say there is such a thing as an event without predecessors, a phantom event, an event out of nowhere, I thought, and sealed my lips..."
* * *
"...Everything slowed down. There is a last time, I thought, for everything. I began to dream. In my dream, everything faded. A last moment, a last breath. The world closing down around the thing. A mouth closing around an object. The sky closing in on a body. Everything folds into darkness. People die, objects cease to exist, trees vanish. I felt my heart skip up to my throat in the space of my dream. I am choking, I thought..."
* * *
"...When I bent down to stack the papers, I thought the sensation I had had in my brain earlier was the same sensation I had once felt when I shook a pomegranate near my ear. Or, not exactly a sensation, but a sound. That when I shook the pomegranate it had made the same sound as the sound my blood made when it swiveled in my brain, and that both sounds led to the same sensation: of something having dissolved where it shouldn’t have. I went over the memory, from when I picked up the pomegranate to when I shook it near my ear: I had squeezed the pomegranate by rolling it, had pressed into it with my thumbs, juiced it without cracking it open, because it’s the only way to juice a pomegranate without any special machines. All the juice was swiveling about inside the shell of the pomegranate, channeling its way around the seeds the way river water channels itself around driftwood. When I put the pomegranate down I could still hear the juice working its way around the seeds that were dead without their pulp. I had squeezed the pomegranate till the pulp was dead. I could invent a machine to juice pomegranates, I thought, and not just pomegranates but persimmons too, some very basic, cheap tool people could use in their homes, and then I imagined a thousand people, all wearing their house slippers, juicing their pomegranates and persimmons for breakfast, and I thought, never mind, no doubt someone has already invented it..."
* * *
"Fra Keeler" is published by Dorothy A Publishing Project. How did that relationship come about?
Danielle Dutton, the founder and editor of the press, wrote to me and asked if the manuscript was still available. At the time I was living in Girona, a remote Medieval city in Catalonia. I remember the day I got her email. I had just come back from a convent in the hills of Sant Daniel where I was hoping I could rent a cheap room to write in. I was disappointed; the nuns had rejected me. In the evening, I received Danielle’s email. It really turned the day around. She told me a few people had mentioned the manuscript to her and suggested she might like it. She did, and it all worked out beautifully. Even though I never got that writing room in the hills, I was (and still am) grateful that Fra Keeler had found such an exquisite home.
Your interests include “contemporary European, American and Middle Eastern fiction; hybrid and cross-genre novels; gender and disability studies; theory; 19th century travel narratives; Iranian cinema; New Wave cinema; and silent films.” Amazing! But how did these interests develop? How are they relevant and what makes them important for regular readers to explore?
We live in a globalized world where everything we do is interconnected. It seems strange to have to make a case for the relevance of international literature. And then there is our basic humanness, which for good or for bad remains a constant, shared fabric despite our shifting national boundaries. I am referring to the first part of the list here, which I recognize is still limited in scope despite its reach. The rest of the “interests” are randomly generated. Thankfully, what I am interested in is always changing. I suppose I would ask in return: Is there anything that isn’t relevant to literature, assuming that literature is about living?
Who are some of the contemporary authors and artists whose works you enjoy? Why?
There are too many to list here, but hopefully a short list of who I’ve been reading over the past few months will shed some light on the question: Clairce Lispector, Ben Lerner, Cesar Aira, Elena Ferrante, Enrique Vila Matas, Josep Pla, Walter Benjamin, Kafka, Jean Philippe Toussaint, Graham Greene… As for the why: there is something about the rhythm of their language that is hypnotic and that allows me to begin the descent into writing.
zareen Van der Vliet Oloomi
avvo_profile_2015
Assistant Professor of English
Specialty: Fiction Writing, Latin American and Iberian literature, world literature, literature in translation
Degrees: MFA Literary Arts (Fiction), Brown University; BA Creative Writing, Latin American Studies, University of California, San Diego
Azareen Van Der Vliet Oloomi is the author of the critically acclaimed novel Fra Keeler (Dorothy, a publishing project). She is the winner of 2015 Whiting Writers' Award (for “early accomplishment and the promise of great work to come”), a National Book Foundation "5 Under 35" honoree, the recipient of a MacDowell Fellowship, a Fulbright Fellowship in Fiction to Catalonia, Spain, and a Fellowship from the Institució de les Lletres Catalanes in Barcelona. Her work has appeared in or is forthcoming from GRANTA, BOMB, The Los Angeles Review of Books Quarterly Journal, Paris Review Daily, Guernica, The Believer, The Brooklyn Rail, Words Without Borders, and elsewhere. She has lived in Iran, Spain, Italy, various parts of the United States, and the United Arab Emirates. Fra Keeler has been translated into Italian and was published by Giulio Perrone Editore in 2015. Azareen Van der Vliet Oloomi splits her time between South Bend, Indiana, and Florence, Italy. Her next novel is forthcoming from Houghton Mifflin Harcourt.
Contact Information
210 Decio Faculty Hall
(574) 631-0477
avanderv@nd.edu
Postal address
Department of English
356 O’Shaughnessy
Notre Dame, IN 46556
Call Me Zebra
Bridget Thoreson
Booklist.
114.7 (Dec. 1, 2017): p25. From Book Review Index Plus.
COPYRIGHT 2017 American Library Association http://www.ala.org/ala/aboutala/offices/publishing/booklist_publications/booklist/booklist.cfm
Full Text:
Call Me Zebra.
By Azareen Van der Vliet Oloomi.
Feb. 2018.304p. HMH, $24 (9780544944602).
She decided to call herself Zebra as she looked at the stripes cast across her father's casket by the sun. After she and her father had wandered in exile following a harrowing escape from their homeland of Iran, where a young Zebra witnessed her mother's death, they had become the world to each other. So his passing in New York has left Zebra unmoored. Raised in a highly literary family and finding meaning more in books than in the intellectual "rodents" whom she was taught to believe make up most of the human population, Zebra decides to retrace her exiled wanderings as preparation for writing a manifesto that will connect the threads of all the literature she has been steeped in throughout her life. This plan, however, is interrupted by a man she meets in Barcelona, who aggravates and intrigues her at the same time. Van der Vliet Oloomi's extravagant, sometimes overwrought prose, like her obsessive heroine, will not suit everyone. But for those willing to expend the effort, Call Me Zebra offers an arresting exploration of grief alongside a powder keg of a romance.--Bridget Thoreson
Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
Thoreson, Bridget. "Call Me Zebra." Booklist, 1 Dec. 2017, p. 25. Book Review Index Plus,
http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A519036171/GPS?u=schlager&sid=GPS& xid=8f0633f2. Accessed 24 Feb. 2018.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A519036171
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Call Me Zebra
Publishers Weekly.
264.47 (Nov. 20, 2017): p67. From Book Review Index Plus. COPYRIGHT 2017 PWxyz, LLC http://www.publishersweekly.com/
Full Text:
* Call Me Zebra
Azareen Van der Vliet Oloomi. Houghton
Mifflin Harcourt, $24 (304p) ISBN 978-0-544994460-2
In Oloomi's rich and delightful novel (after Fra Keeler), 22-year-old Zebra is the last in a long line of "Autodidacts, Anarchists, Atheists" exiled from early '90s Iran. Years after her family's harrowing escape, alone in New York after the death of her father (her mother died in their flight to the Kurdish border), Zebra decides to revisit some of the places where she has lived in an effort to both retrace her family's dislocation and to compose a grand manifesto on the meaning of literature. Like Don Quixote, one of her favorite characters, Zebra's perception of the world (and herself) is not as it appears to others, and her narration crackles throughout with wit and absurdity. As she treks across Catalonian Spain, she journeys through books and love affairs and philosophical tousles with Ludo Bembo, her also-displaced Italian foil. Their pattern of romantic coupling and intellectual uncoupling repeats itself; more interesting are Zebra's other exploits-her strange and brilliant interpretations of art, her belief that her mother's soul has been reincarnated inside a cockatoo, and the field-trip group she takes on pilgrimages to famous sites of exile. This is a sharp and genuinely fun picaresque, employing humor and poignancy side-by-side to tell an original and memorable story. (Feb.)
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Caption: In Azareen Van der Vliet Oloomi's delightful novel Call Me Zebra, a woman retraces the journey she and her father made from Iran years earlier (reviewed on this page).
Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
"Call Me Zebra." Publishers Weekly, 20 Nov. 2017, p. 67. Book Review Index Plus,
http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A517262061/GPS?u=schlager&sid=GPS& xid=e959bf97. Accessed 24 Feb. 2018.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A517262061
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Van der Vliet Oloomi, Azareen: CALL ME ZEBRA
Kirkus Reviews.
(Dec. 15, 2017): From Book Review Index Plus. COPYRIGHT 2017 Kirkus Media LLC http://www.kirkusreviews.com/
Full Text:
Van der Vliet Oloomi, Azareen CALL ME ZEBRA Houghton Mifflin Harcourt (Adult Fiction) $24.00 2, 6 ISBN: 978-0-544-94460-2
A young woman struggles to make sense of the tragedy of exile, embarking on a series of pilgrimages that may destroy her chance for happiness.
Bibi Abbas Abbas Hosseini, the thorny, tragicomic heroine of Van der Vliet Oloomi's (Fra Keeler, 2012, etc.) darkly funny novel, is a narrator who deliberately resists categorization. Raised in Iran during the height of the Iraq War, Bibi fled with her parents, the last survivors of a proud tribe of "Autodidacts, Anarchists, Atheists." Their journey was filled with horrors--death, fatigue, and hunger--and it haunts her into a fractured adulthood in New York City. Now, more than a decade after fleeing Iran, with her parents both dead, Bibi seeks a new mentor, vocation, and identity. The Zebra, she muses, is "an animal striped black-and-white like a prisoner of war; an animal that rejects all binaries, that represents ink on paper"; it's a name fit for an outsider, and she takes it on. In order to honor her ancestors, Zebra decides to make a "Grand Tour of Exile" through the Old World. She returns to Barcelona, her family's last stop before arriving in the U.S., to confront the intellectual, spiritual, and moral residues of colonialism and capitalism. There she meets Ludo Bembo, an Italian philologist who both repels and intrigues her. Their love affair is tempestuous, ultimately forcing Zebra to confront the way she uses literature to both separate and connect herself to the world and to others. "I am unafraid to admit that the world we live in is violent, obtuse; that a gulf, once opened, is not easily sealed; that one does not drink from the water of death and go on living disaffected, untouched," she thinks near the end of her journey. In knotty prose, Van der Vliet Oloomi both satirizes and embraces a young intellectual's self-absorbed love for her philosophical forbears. The novel is a bombastic homage to the metacriticism of Borges, the Romantic absurdity of Cervantes, and the punk-rock autofictions of Kathy Acker--all figures who loom large in Zebra's mind. As such, it's not easy to pin down the narrative itself, which is less interested in plot than in how Zebra's interior landscape might be projected onto the world. (At times of great sadness and confusion, the storm clouds quite literally roll in.) Perhaps most astonishing is that we get to revel in the intellectual formation--and emotional awakening--of a frustrating, complicated, hilarious, and, at times, deliberately annoying heroine whose very capriciousness would prevent her from surfacing in any other novel or under any other writer's care.
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This is a brilliant, demented, and bizarro book that demands and rewards all the attention a reader might dare to give it.
Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
"Van der Vliet Oloomi, Azareen: CALL ME ZEBRA." Kirkus Reviews, 15 Dec. 2017. Book
Review Index Plus, http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A518491339/GPS?u=schlager& sid=GPS&xid=fc1c7ffe. Accessed 24 Feb. 2018.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A518491339
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Van der Vliet Oloomi, Azareen. Fra
Keeler
Evelyn Beck
Library Journal.
137.16 (Oct. 1, 2012): p74. From Book Review Index Plus.
COPYRIGHT 2012 Library Journals, LLC. A wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
http://www.libraryjournal.com/
Full Text:
Van der Vliet Oloomi, Azareen. Fra Keeler. Dorothy, dist. by SPD. Oct. 2012. c.128p. ISBN 9780984469345. pap. $16. F
Until the very end, nothing much happens in this slight novel about an unnamed narrator who moves into the house of his friend, Fra Keeler, to investigate Keeler's death. The narrator is, at best, distracted and unable to focus. The appearance of the mailman outside is one of several events that absorb his attention obsessively and, at times, amusingly. He is drawn to a structure in the backyard, becomes fascinated by trees, stares at his neighbor. He's childlike in some ways, but he's also annoyingly unlikable, and he doesn't answer any of the questions readers will inevitably have. As the story proceeds, the narrator becomes less and less connected to reality and seems increasingly malevolent, until the novel erupts into violence and action. VERDICT The conclusion is terrific, but the rest of the novel requires a patient reader sufficiently interested in the slow unraveling of a human mind not to mind the absence of traditional storytelling. Recommended for those who enjoy experimental fiction by the likes of Alain Robbe-Grillet and for fans of psychological fiction by writers such as Edgar Allan Poe.--Evelyn Beck, Piedmont Technical Coll., Greenwood, SC
Beck, Evelyn
Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
Beck, Evelyn. "Van der Vliet Oloomi, Azareen. Fra Keeler." Library Journal, 1 Oct. 2012, p. 74.
Book Review Index Plus, http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A303350259 /GPS?u=schlager&sid=GPS&xid=fff90468. Accessed 24 Feb. 2018.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A303350259
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Fra Keeler
Publishers Weekly.
259.35 (Aug. 27, 2012): p43. From Book Review Index Plus. COPYRIGHT 2012 PWxyz, LLC http://www.publishersweekly.com/
Full Text: Fra Keeler
Azareen Van der Vliet Oloomi. Dorothy, a publishing project (SPD, dist.), $16 trade paper (128p) ISBN 978-0-9844693-4-5
Van der Vliet Oloomi's debut novel turns out to be a surrealist triumph despite a jerky entry into the narrator's world. An unnamed man purchases a house with one thought in mind--to investigate the death of its former owner, Fra Keeler. Upon moving in, however, his investigation becomes hindered by his own tangled thoughts. A clearly unreliable narrator, the character nonetheless draws the reader deeper into his mental labyrinth, as snippets of a possible truth shine through as from a blinding streak of lightning on a dark night. Lurching toward an understanding of Fra Keeler's death, the protagonist wrestles with issues of sanity, madness, life, death, and happiness. This short but substantial novel both celebrates the process of thinking and offers cautions about the perils of our inner monologues. A rare gem of a book that begs to be read again. Agent: Kate Johnson, Georges Borchardt, Inc. (Oct.)
Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
"Fra Keeler." Publishers Weekly, 27 Aug. 2012, p. 43. Book Review Index Plus,
http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A301282584/GPS?u=schlager&sid=GPS& xid=598245d5. Accessed 24 Feb. 2018.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A301282584
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Fra Keeler by Azareen Van der Vliet Oloomi
Fra Keeler is the story of a man who buys a house on the edge of a canyon. The former owner of the house, Fra Keeler, is dead. That death seems to haunt the man, or, perhaps it's better to say, it itches at him, an internal itch that draws his attention over and over, just as Fra Keeler's name is repeated throughout the text.
The man, our narrator, is mentally myopic. His skewed reality fills the page, while outside perspectives push through the narrator's churning thoughts to come at the reader sideways. At first, it seems like the narrator's thoughts are an attempt to make sense of Fra Keeler's death and the "unfriendly events" that have followed that death. But the sense the narrator puts together is not about Fra Keeler, though he starts with the contradiction between a piece of paper saying that Fra Keeler died in Palma de Mallorca and another saying he died in the Netherlands. From there, his thoughts spiral, moving forward while repeating, carrying the reader down pathways that are simultaneously logical and impossible, pathways that dead-end in unexpected and unintended conclusions. He considers the nature of cause and effect, the movement of time, and tries to make sense, or rather, "to make senselessness," which "is sense at its peak." The house's dusty skylight, for example, occupies his thoughts as steadily as any clue in a murder mystery. Here he his looking up at it:
...[T]he next person to notice is a few lineages down, or not at all, I thought, because you'll never know if that person will stop to look up at the same surface, and if he does there would be no guarantee that he would have the same thought. But then thoughts get passed around from brain to brain, so that our thoughts are only ever a repetition of someone else's thoughts. A thought that came before us and planted itself in our brain as though it belonged to us, inextricable from our being. And that is exactly what the skylight is, I thought: inextricable.
The mystery of Fra Keeler's death drives the narrator forward, while the narrator's thoughts, endlessly circling, spooling out and back in, drive the reader.
The plot is marked by solid objects, rather than by events. There's a yurt, a mailman, a ringing phone, a skylight, a neighbor, a club, and a canyon. The chains of cause and effect are loosened, unmooring the present moment from the past and future. Sometimes, time flows as expected: the narrator leaves his kitchen and walks to the yurt. He opens the door and goes inside. Sometimes, time comes undone: he stands inside the yurt and says, "Fra Keeler." Immediately, he is amid the trees, with no memory of leaving the yurt. In other instances, moments are lashed together through the narrator's assumptions of cause and effect: a mailman delivers a package and later the phone rings. The narrator is certain it's the mailman who is calling. Each time, the narrator tries to fit the events into a pattern, searching through his thoughts for an explanation.
Though difficult to describe, the book is a pleasure to read. Rather than constructing an argument, the narrator's thoughts accumulate and accrue, pooling around the yurt, the skylight, Fra Keeler, and other people and objects. Azareen Van der Vliet Oloomi makes use of the narrator's logical wanderings to engage in word- and thought-play that is both delightful and, as the narrative continues, vaguely threatening. The narrator gently shifts from considering what appears to be an actual death, the death of Fra Keeler, to considering the potential deaths that exist in every moment of living, and these thoughts about death jostle with thoughts about shattered telephones reforming themselves and tables chopped up and then made anew. Images, objects, and thoughts recur and acquire urgency. They become increasingly important to the narrator, leading him down a path he can't predict, urging him to take action, some kind of action. Slowly, it becomes apparent that his mental gymnastics are too pointed for comfort. He makes connections between a skylight and Fra Keeler, between a package and a neighbor, and the reader follows. He looks at that dusty skylight, that inextricable skylight, and thinks, "nothing should be inextricable," his previous thought emerging as a threat.
Even as events cohere, the narrative dances amid the surreal, frustrating attempts to impose sense on the narrator's senselessness. But senselessness shouldn't be confused with a lack of meaning. Just as the word- and thought-play is both delightful and menacing, the narrator's logic chains are both convincing and impossible, like the patterns we all make out of everyday life. And as comforting as those patterns are, they can go too far.
Fra Keeler by Azareen Van der Vliet Oloomi
Dorothy, a publishing project
ISBN: 978-0984469345
128 pages
The “Cosmological Nothingness” of Azareen Van der Vliet Oloomi
John Wisniewski interviews Azareen Van der Vliet Oloomi
JUNE 18, 2015
THE FOLLOWING INTERVIEW is with Persian-American author Azareen Van der Vliet Oloomi. She is the author of Fra Keeler, a unique thriller that pulls the reader into a complex puzzle and adds touches of humor. Her writing has been compared to that of French author Alain Robbe-Grillet, among others, has garnered prestigious awards, and has appeared in numerous magazines and publications.
In Oloomi’s debut novel, a man purchases a house, the house of Fra Keeler. When he moves in he becomes obsessed with the circumstances of the former owner’s death. His investigation spirals out of control, and we realize we are dealing with a paranoid fixation, with mental illness. But with a twist; as Matthew Jakubowski writes in The Millions:
From this angle, Fra Keeler can be viewed as a critique of the attraction many writers, readers, critics, and scholars have to the clichéd glamor of evil, who fetishize the gorgeous anguish associated with men struggling with mental illness. And once we make this connection between novels that revel in spectacles of madness to the male violence at its roots (see Raskolnikov, Humbert, et al), and after we acknowledge that readers thrill to such spectacles and scholars add them to the canon — should this not prick at the conscience and urge us to examine our tastes?
In this interview, Oloomi speaks about her influences, her writing, and her future projects.
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JOHN WISNIEWSKI: When did you begin writing? Did you write short stories?
AZAREEN VAN DER VLIET OLOOMI: I started writing when I was seven. I kept a diary. I had just moved to Iran from the United States via Spain with my family, and I felt like I needed to record everything I was seeing. I kept long lists of the food I ate, advertisements I would see on billboards, the number of cats I would find in our yard, the number of people piled onto a single motorcycle, etc. The diary writing went on for a number of years. I had no idea I was writing; I had no awareness of what I was doing. I started writing consciously in college. I wrote short stories, yes — philosophical ones because at the time I was reading a lot of Gabriel García Márquez, Borges, Fuentes, and Juan Rulfo. Come to think of it, I wrote a story about a man who never left his house. I was very lucky to study with and be surrounded by writers like Rae Armantrout, Eileen Myles, Renee Gladman, and Michelle Latiolais, who taught me discipline. Through them, I became interested in deterritorializing language, in pushing narrative to its limits. I was and still am interested in an aesthetics of failure: in seeing the shapes narrative is capable of taking on when it’s been pushed over the edge.
Who are some of your favorite authors?
I’m a slow reader, but I tend to read from as many literary and aesthetic traditions as I can manage, and I’m often reading books in multiple languages. A short list would include: Lynne Tillman, Lydia Davis, Paul Auster, Brian Evenson, Stacey Levine, Ben Lerner, Danielle Dutton, Claire Donato, Kate Zambreno, Ben Marcus, Teju Cole, Murakami, Enrique Vila-Matas, Christa Wolf, Elena Ferrante, Jean-Philippe Toussaint, Bolaño, Nabokov, Kundera, Saramago. Also, Cervantes, Flaubert, Beckett, Woolf, Borges, Bernhard, Lispector, Robbe-Grillet. More recently, I’ve come to adore Sei Shonagon, Dante, and Petrarch. I confess, I’ve been falling in love with the drama and bombastic quality of medieval literature.
You have said you were inspired by the thrillers of Alain Robbe-Grillet.
Robbe-Grillet’s work has had a huge impact on me, in particular his novel Jealousy, which I love for its static quality. In that book, language originates from a semi-anonymous narrator. The sentences pile up and on revealing small changes that aggregate into a critical mass; in other words, the reality of the novel is revealed through the accumulation of language. In Fra Keeler, language moves in the other direction: the sentences hack away at reality until there is nothing left. Everything is shattered: the phone, the window, the skylight, the neighbor’s body. This unraveling is a double gesture that functions on the level of plot and narrative. For me, Fra Keeler is a novel of unbuilding, of decomposition.
Did you set out to write a unique kind of thriller?
Yes. What I wanted was for the language in Fra Keeler to feel raw and savage in order for it to overtake the reader. I wanted the reader to descend through the language of the text, to be swept away by it as if the novel were a retreating flood taking everything with it, dragging everything into that nothingness at its center. If I could get the reader to identify with the singularity of the narrator’s consciousness, to be enraptured by it, then I could position the reader to question their own relationship to reality. My hope was that in that altered state the reader would be more willing to eschew certainty. I was reaching for a kind of purity of consciousness, for a vulnerable space. Only if I did the work of guiding the reader to that space could I then earn the right to ask readers to reflect on certain troubling questions: What does it mean to be human? Is it reasonable to expect the mind to be stable? Why are we in such a bad state?
How did you see your protagonist — was he someone who would search for the truth and look inward to discover?
The narrator is someone who is searching for meaning, but that search is constantly frustrated by the mind’s acrobatics: the narrator’s memories, delusions, dreams, associations interrupt the forward momentum, the meaning building, leaving him with parts of things, with shattered bits. The novel is as much about the universal impossibility of understanding totality as it is about the narrator’s singularity, his particular unraveling. Rather than to seek truth, the novel seeks, in its own way, to honor the life of the narrator’s mind, even if that mind is unreliable and remorseless.
What will your next novel be about? Will it be in the same genre?
I’m very excited about the novel I’m currently working on. It has a similar restless energy to Fra Keeler, but my concerns are different. I’m thinking a lot about the relationship between literature and landscape these days, not just our mental and emotional landscapes, but the ones out there in the world that shape our geography, language, economy, and culture. I’m also thinking about what it means to have left the Old World to live in the New. To put it simply, the new novel is about a bizarre love story and the journey of a lifetime through the western Mediterranean; it’s about abandoning the New World to return to the Old in order to sink into the architecture of deep time. It’s a darkly comic novel that explores the relationship between literature, art, space, and mortality from the point of view of a narrator who, to borrow Enrique Vila-Matas’s term, suffers from intense bouts of “literature sickness”! It’s a strange, and, I hope, very funny text!
What are you doing when not writing?
I’m not sure I’m ever not writing. Literature has become the mediating force in my life. I’m always thinking about how this or that event, or thing that were said, can be dramatized in fiction. That being said, I do do other things: I travel quite a bit, I walk along the South Bend river with my dogs, and, when in Italy, I’m very good at eating gelato and drinking wine. I also like to stare at paintings, usually one at a time, which makes museum-going a rather arduous and expensive affair!
Has Fra Keeler had great success in the United States?
I think Fra Keeler has done rather well. In fact, this year it received a Whiting Award. There’s been some foreign interest, and it’s currently being translated into Italian. I absolutely love the Italian cover; the title was translated as Il misterioso caso di Fra Keeler, which places it in the tradition of more psychological/philosophical noir novels. I think readers in Italy, in particular readers of titles published by independent houses, will be drawn to the metaphysical and existential questions posed by the novel; I say this because so much of the Italian literary tradition — from Dante and Petrarch to Italo Calvino and Primo Levi — is concerned with the relationship between the real and the unreal, or the real and the possible/the potential. The editors at Giulio Perrone were particularly drawn by what they referred to as the “cosmological nothingness” that lies at the center of Fra Keeler.
Could you see the book as a film?
I can, even though it is a sparse and deeply psychological novel. Fra Keeler was inspired by both Iranian and French New Wave cinema, in particular by films like Le Cercle Rouge and Rohmer’s Six Moral Tales. So, yes, I could certainly see it being translated back onto the screen. I think that would be incredibly fascinating, and I have high hopes that someone out there would be up for the challenge.
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John Wisniewski is a freelance writer who has written for Grey Lodge Review, Horror Garage, Paraphilia Magazine, and Sensitive Skin Magazine.
Fra Keeler by Azareen Van Der Vliet Oloomi
Review by D.H. Varma — Published on March 4, 2013
Tags: dorothy, postmodern fiction
REVIEWED:
Fra Keeler by Azareen Van Der Vliet Oloomi. Dorothy. 128pp., $16.00.
Published in Issue 31
Azareen Van Der Vliet Oloomi’s first novel, Fra Keeler, arrives in an unassuming package, its 128 nearly square pages housing five well-spaced chapters. The narrator buys Fra Keeler’s house and investigates Keeler’s death, but seemingly boring events waylay his investigation. A mailman visits. The man gets a package from Ancestry.com. A representative of the website visits him. He looks at his house’s skylight, hangs out in a yurt, and walks around in a canyon. Blink blink blink and the novel could be finished just like that, consumed in less time than it took to ship from Amazon’s fulfillment center to your doorstep.
But Oloomi’s novel is not about consuming action or plot. At least, not entirely. Much like Pynchon’s The Crying of Lot 49, the book bottles a paranoiac atmosphere. In Pynchon’s novel, paranoia seeps into the protagonist’s consciousness through an investigation of the narrative reality occurring around her. It forces a reader to wonder about the correspondence between two worlds—one of perception and one of reality. In the formalist jargon, The Crying of Lot 49 inquires about the relationship between fabula (narrative event) and syuzhet (a narrator’s perception). But Oloomi’s novel lodges us in the head of a paranoid lunatic and thus uncorks for us a different set of concerns. We glimpse this lunacy in the novel’s very first sentence: “‘It’s on the edge of a canyon,’ the realtor said, raising his eyebrows when I offered to buy the home without having looked at it first.” This inaugurating dismissal of a voice of reason places the narrator squarely in the “not sane” camp. The course of Fra Keeler’s progression, if it is progression at all, is not that of descent into paranoia but a struggle to ascend up the canyon wall of a consciousness known immediately as crazy. Thus, Oloomi’s novel takes the long-established conflict between reality and perception found in contemporary fiction much deeper. Paranoia, here, is a given. In place of a dualistic conflict—like the metaxis between reality and perception Pynchon forces on the reader—Oloomi investigates a tripartite relationship between perception, reality, and textuality.
Oloomi wastes no time in battering us with the conflict between perception and reality. Once the realtor vanishes from the narrator’s thoughts, we have nothing to hold onto. Along with this disappearance, the narrator’s announcement that “Fra Keeler’s death raises questions unanswered by hospital records” implicitly begs the reader to forego any type of objective reality and to go along with him. From here, the narrator jumps straight to a question of identifying a grand schemer, asking himself, “but who, I keep thinking, would want to undertake such massive coordination, who would want to hide Fra Keeler’s connection to the unfriendly events?” By filling the void of unanswered questions with this one, the narrator points the reader toward the direction he faces. In less than a few minutes we are suspicious; we are paranoid like the narrator.
Yes, this feels like a very basic attempt at encouraging intrigue, but the novel gets narratologically more complex within the same page. In no time, the narrator makes a simple, fabulous confession—“I lied.”—which increases our paranoia because it shatters our already shaky belief in the narrator. Conceptually speaking, we have nothing left, either in the world of the narrative’s fabula or its syuzhet. The events are not to be trusted and neither is the entity relaying those events to us.
In an attempt to gain some footing in this novel’s slippery slope, I counted the occurrences of forms of thought or think. I counted 475. That equates to an average of about four occurrences per page. But Oloomi’s narrator doesn’t spread on the “thoughts” or the “thinking” evenly. We find them globbed on some pages and disappeared on others. The passages in which “thought” or “think” occur gesture toward a conceptual schematic of the relationship between reality, perception, and textuality (or language’s combined definition and indefinition).
Moments after his fabulous confession, the narrator granulates our confidence in his narration when he tells us, “I found the truth in the drawer. I opened the drawer and it was simply there, a sheet of paper like any other sheet of paper.” But this paper does not contain what we expect. Nothing on the sheet is clearly written; all is smeared, forcing the narrator to extrapolate it for himself and for us. Instead of “the truth,” the narrator’s reading only produces a truth. The narrator refuses to grant us access to a narrative comprehension of the why and how of Keeler’s death, and language becomes an immovable, transparent membrane between “event” and “thought.”
It is no mistake, then, that Oloomi’s narrator realizes that the skylight in Keeler’s home is “inextricable” (like language, or the thought it precedes) and that he must break it. As he is about to club the skylight, he announces that “The duplicity of things is unbearable,” and we understand that he wants to break open this symbol of textuality in order to unify event with thought. But something interrupts this momentous action. Actually, two things. First, the narrator gets self-conscious. He thinks himself out of breaking the skylight—“what madness is this?”—only to think himself back into it. But after finally having convinced himself to do it, a representative of Ancestry.com is standing in the driveway. It becomes an event. He lets the representative inside, they quizzically chat, and then he starts thinking again, leaving his beef with the skylight for a while, effectively quelling the wave of “madness” in him.
And, what’s more, the narrator understands these disruptions as essential to his struggle to comprehend how Keeler died. While waiting at the door of the old woman next door, whom he has deemed to be masterminding “the massive coordination” surrounding the death, the narrator meditates on the way the novel’s events have been unfriendly to his cerebral investigation:
Events—I paced back and forth by her front door—get in the way of knowledge, wedge themselves intrusively between oneself and one’s knowledge, and not just that, I thought, pacing very rapidly back and forth. New events introduce themselves, become involved with other events. So that one morning you wake up and find yourself tangled up in them.
The first sentence of this extended thought is a microcosm of the novel’s major theme: thought disrupts action; it disrupts the event of the narrator’s pacing back and force. This passage hints at what is already very clear—that language, or textuality, serves as the playground for the problematics of relating or differentiating event from thought, reality from perception, and fabula from syuzhet. Without syntax, the definition of these concepts and their relationships would not be possible. But because of syntax, these concepts interrupt each other. Thus, syntax makes possible definition, disruption, and irresolution.
The narrative itself knows that we want to see the inextricable, anxiety-ridden duality of language broken, for it is clearly our antagonist. So the narrator, unable to enter the old lady’s house through the front door, returns with the same club in his hand, standing over her skylight. He tells us he is there simply to “spy into her house through the skylight on her roof,” but his lunacy shows up quickly in the fixated tone of his self-reminder: “That is what I’ll do, I said to myself, maintaining a line of thought: I will climb directly onto her roof.” And yet, once he is there, standing on the roof, he does not do what he says he will do. He does not spy on her. Instead, he fixates on the skylight. Then, of course, he breaks it. It is a causal event we glimpse only through effects because it occurs in the ellipsis of a page break. Afterwards, the narrator becomes a detached observer of what he’s done, and it’s through his observations that we discover he has killed the old lady. But the narrator starts to ask himself a set of questions similar to those elicited in earlier paranoiac works: “Was it real? I thought, and looked down at my hands,” or “Couldn’t I have imagined it?” By breaking the skylight, the symbol of textuality, the narrator thinks he will finally locate knowledge about the situation. But instead, all he finds is detachment from events and more questions about what he perceives.
Our narrator, getting pistol-whipped in an interrogation room toward the end of the novel, feels he hears his own death and equates it with being in a large body of liquid. That is, our narrator, after symbolically smashing language, symbolically enters oblivion. And oblivion is the only result of a shattering of language. Thus, by taking paranoia as a founding conceptual assumption, Oloomi’s novel pushes us forward into the problems associated with “knowing.” The novel’s symbolic fission of literature’s fundamental building blocks helps us see textuality as both evil and necessary. Evil because it is the cause of nerve-wracking duplicity and doubt, and necessary because, without it, knowledge is merely an oblivion.
D.H. Varma perpetually wakes up in Memphis, TN. His fiction has been published in A Clean, Well-Lighted Place and The Oxford American.
Published in Issue 31
Love You Madly: The Dorothy Project and Azareen Van der Vliet Oloomi’s Fra Keeler
Reviews
Matthew Jakubowski October 9, 2012 | 8 books mentioned 2 6 min read
Related Books:
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Publishing for publishing’s sake was the last thing Danielle Dutton had in mind when she founded her independent press called the Dorothy Project three years ago. “Starting a press simply to add to the piles and piles of books in the world (or just in my house) wasn’t interesting to me,” Dutton said via email.
“I’ve long admired presses that seem to carve out a specific niche all their own, such as Dalkey Archive (where I worked for four years before starting Dorothy), or Siglio (a press out of L.A. that focuses on work at the intersection of art and literature, and which, incidentally, published my second book).”
To that end, Dorothy follows a disciplined model: two books a year with the goal “to seek out and publish writing that takes risks, that surprises and challenges and delights us as readers; to have a tightly curated list; and to work to create beautiful book objects.”
The focus on quality over quantity has had good results. “We’ve been incredibly lucky so far for a new small press,” Dutton said, citing “good coverage” for the press itself and many reviews. “I’m very thankful for that, and I wonder if reviewers and editors have been intrigued by our constraint-based plan (only two books per year, all the same size, mostly written by women). We’re doing something specific, and maybe that is, for better or worse, an ‘angle’ by which to approach us.”
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Well-known, experimental writers such as Ben Marcus have taken notice: for The Millions’s 2011 “Year in Reading” series, he recommended the Dorothy Project’s reprint of Barbara Comyn’s Who Was Changed and Who Was Dead. Future projects will include the final book in Renee Gladman’s Ravicka trilogy, and a collection of stories by Amina Cain.
The two books Dutton selects each year are intended to form a contrast. “This year’s two books — Suzanne Scanlon’s Promising Young Women and Azareen Van der Vliet Oloomi’s Fra Keeler — both deal with madness. Both are debut novels from younger American women writers. But stylistically they’re worlds apart, and the fact that they came together as a perfect pair was somewhat accidental.” Both go on sale this month.
Fra Keeler begins as an investigation by an anonymous, male narrator into the mysterious death of the title character. The first scene shows him buying Keeler’s house from a realtor.
(Certain) events of the unfriendliest category are now unfolding. I cannot put my finger on these events; I cannot pinpoint the exact dimensions of their effect. The truth is, I haven’t been the same since Fra Keeler’s death. Some deaths are more than just a death, I keep thinking, and Fra Keeler’s was exemplary in this sense. And it is the same thought since I left the realtor’s office: some people’s deaths need to be thoroughly investigated, and, Yes, I think then, Yes: I bought this home in order to fully investigate Fra Keeler’s death.
We’re not told what the narrator’s relationship is to Keeler, why he needs to go so far as to buy the man’s house, or where he came up with the money. These omitted facts — carefully ignored pieces of character- and plot-information — belie how much this narrator depends on the momentum of his thoughts to keep his story moving. The manic energy in the language sustains a careful, unsettling tension that’s central to the plot and the novel’s meaning.
We soon learn that this man is a keenly intelligent person suffering not from grief over Keeler’s death, but extreme curiosity and paranoid fixation. After telling how he moved into Keeler’s house, he suddenly stops to say, ominously, “Things creep up on us when we deny their existence. …I must retrace,” and then he dives into a flashback that takes up the bulk of the book.
In terms of plot action, he accepts a package from the mailman, makes a phone call, looks out the window, drinks water in the kitchen, goes for a walk in the nearby canyon (the valley of death?), and visits a neighbor. Meanwhile, he muses on causation and the nature of time, sits in a canoe he finds in the time-traveling yurt that’s appeared in the yard, and later decides that all of humanity’s perception of time is a “purified lie.” Headaches and dizzy spells come and go. He grows suspicious of an old woman in the neighborhood, then sees her face — or his own mother’s face — in a dream, accusing him of throwing acid at her.
Van der Vliet Oloomi’s spare, clear language sets this novel apart from other fiction about mental illness. The controlled tone adds complexity to the narrator’s unreliability as we maintain an immediate awareness of who he is versus what he’s telling us. Well-placed surreal scenes are also described plainly, and then mocked sometimes, as in this moment where a cactus turns into an old woman:
I spotted a cactus a few feet away. The stems were bowing down toward the ground. Not like a light bulb, I thought, this cactus, and I walked one full circle around it. It is a green mass of death, I thought. I stood there for a while, the cactus occupying the whole space of my brain, just as the sky had occupied it a moment earlier. I mused over the shape of the cactus until a chubby, toothless old lady formed in its place. She stared at the horizon. She said, “Take a good look, because this is me now, this is me as I am dying.” I felt a second pang go through my chest. I didn’t know if it was the cactus talking, or the old lady. Weren’t they one and the same, hadn’t they emerged from the same entity? Then, I thought, what rot, the things in one’s head. Because images just appear, an old lady out of nowhere, where the cactus had been. One minute, and then the next, what is the use of these things?
He’s a kook with depth. As a person, he comes across as witty and self-effacing, not powerfully cold and psychotic. He later comments on why madness may be necessary in life, and makes moral judgments about other people’s behavior. Naturally, these aspects humanize him and elicit our sympathy and it doesn’t hurt that he acts like a lovable goofball at times. “Dumb as a lobster, you are Mr. Mailman,” he says at one point, while after a snack and a stroll, he says with childlike joy, “How helpful the slice of bread had been, the walk in the canyon!”
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He would be charming. But there’s the book’s violent ending to consider. And as I did, I saw this charm being put to a specific purpose. As I thought about it, Fra Keeler reminded me of Rivka Galchen’s Atmospheric Disturbances, Roberto Bolano’s The Third Reich, and Jean-Philippe Toussaint’s Reticence, not to mention big classics like Crime and Punishment and Lolita. And what emerged as I considered a bit of context was that one vital aspect is Fra Keeler’s construction: the ending recasts the whole tenor of the book, illuminating who that realtor truly was and who the narrator might really have been. Then something clicked: the book had ingeniously play-acted a role I had wanted it to perform.
From this angle, Fra Keeler can be viewed as a critique of the attraction many writers, readers, critics, and scholars have to the clichéd glamor of evil, who fetishize the gorgeous anguish associated with men struggling with mental illness. And once we make this connection between novels that revel in spectacles of madness to the male violence at its roots (see Raskolnikov, Humbert, et al), and after we acknowledge that readers thrill to such spectacles and scholars add them to the canon – should this not prick at the conscience and urge us to examine our tastes?
Sure, it may only be fiction. But our enjoyment of it says a lot. Avoiding this issue seems to do ourselves and these male characters (and their male shadows in the real world), a disservice, waiting as it were for the next male-ghoul to be put on mad-parade in front of us to jab and laugh at as we turn the page — while pretending we’re actually learning more about the glory, jest, and riddle of the world.
To be clear, Fra Keeler does not abuse its male narrator in this way. Van der Vliet Oloomi hints sympathetically that war, that poisoned source of eternal male vainglory, is what might have driven the narrator to violence and madness. Rather, one of the things Fra Keeler does is offer a wondrously clear lens to those who want to examine tastes that have been taught to lurch grotesquely in the direction of male anxiety, mental illness, and violence when seeking so-called good literature.
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Matthew Jakubowski ’s short stories have appeared recently in Necessary Fiction and Barrelhouse (online) and been broadcast on WXPN 88.5 in Philadelphia. He’s at work on a new novel and has written for Bookforum.com, The National, and hyperallergic, among others. He lives in West Philadelphia.
Azardeen Van der Vliet Oloomi's exciting 'Fra Keeler'
Plus, Jeffrey Fleishman coaxes mystery from forgetting in 'Shadow Man.'
December 27, 2012|By Jenny Hendrix
The covers of 'Fra Keeler' by author Azareen Van der Vliet Oloomi and 'Shadow Man' by author Jeffrey Fleishman.
The covers of 'Fra Keeler' by author Azareen Van der Vliet Oloomi… (Dorothy, a publishing project;…)
Fra Keeler
Azardeen Van der Vliet Oloomi
Dorothy Project: 128 pp., $16 paper
Unreliability is central to "Fra Keeler," Azardeen Van der Vliet Oloomi's exciting debut from the tiny Dorothy Project imprint. It's a stunning psychological thriller, a total identification with madness that creates drama without either belittling or romanticizing the insane.
Told in tight, unencumbered prose from the snarled confines of a nameless narrator's mind, the novel begins when a man moves into the former home of one Fra Keeler, determined to investigate the manner of the latter's death. There is some relationship between the two, but it's not made explicit: "I cannot put my finger on these events; I cannot pinpoint the exact dimensions of their effect. The truth is, I haven't been the same since Fra Keeler's death. Some deaths are more than just a death, I keep thinking, and Fra Keeler's was exemplary in this sense."
The narrator goes for a walk in a canyon, eats bread, drinks water, and little else — yet in the context of the novel, even these facts are no more than intermittent streaks of clarity. Possessed of an intelligence of a peculiar kind and determined to investigate "the space between events," Oloomi's narrator tries and fails to connect everything from the ringing of the phone to a cactus to a dream about his mother into bizarre, paranoid geometries of mind.
Still, the canny narrator's thoughts, which reel and falter as incidents accumulate, sustain a note of drama — and blessedly, humor — that provide the novel with the manic energy and tensile strength to pull it along toward its mystifying, violent end.
Shadow Man
A novel
Jeffrey Fleishman
Steerforth: 208 pp., $15.95 paper
This novel of a foreign correspondent suffering from early-onset Alzheimer's uses multiple perspectives and a broken sense of time to build an image of the mind losing its grip on the present.
Jeffrey Fleishman — himself a prize-winning correspondent for The Times — coaxes mystery from forgetting. The novel's central character, reporter James Ryan, drifts between an endlessly repeated present and the only period of time he can remember: the summer after his mother died. As Ryan recounts the trip he and his father took to Virginia Beach with a seemingly free-spirited stranger named Vera, the story becomes steeped in paranoia. It emerges that Vera also is haunted by her past.
Fleishman's writing is lyrical and quite lovely at times. But his dialogue's tone never wavers from that of the narration, making it hard to distinguish speakers and lending the novel a kind of unvarying solemnity: "When you come back now, you are like a man on a doorstep peeking into a house with your car running on the street. Where do you go when you run into the street? Why can't I follow and bring you back? Is it a fortress there?" Ultimately, the prose is too smooth and the protagonist too reliable for the novel to fully draw out how this dreadful disease might feel.
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The Straight Way Was Lost: Azareen Van der Vliet Oloomi’s “Call Me Zebra”
By Nathan Scott McNamara
FEBRUARY 6, 2018
AS THE PARAMEDICS futilely try to bring Abbas Abbas Hosseini back to life, his daughter Zebra — last in a long line of valiant thinkers — stands in their New York apartment dizzily watching, feeling like she’s dissolving. They don’t listen when Zebra murmurs that he’s not coming back, that he died when it was time for him to die, that his mind is already “in the process of being reabsorbed into the mind of the universe.” A police officer finally comes over to Zebra with questions. He asks her what she does for a living.
“I am composing a manifesto,” she responds.
Zebra is an anarchist, atheist, and autodidact. She is also an exile, carried in utero from her parent’s home city of Tehran, her parents driven out by a long line of tyrannical conquerors, “each of whom briefly took pleasure in the rubble of dynasties past.” Saddam Hussein, who “proudly launched a brutal and tactless war on a fatigued and divided Iran,” was the despot who ultimately displaced her father and mother. They finally ran for the hills, having already suffered enough loss to last a lifetime.
Growing up on the run, Zebra’s life and mind are stuffed with literature. How does an exile also live as a bibliophile? Memorization, among other things. In the moments of stasis, Zebra’s father surrounds her with books by “The Great Writers of the Past”: Friedrich Nietzsche, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Omar Khayyam, Rainer Maria Rilke, Franz Kafka, Miguel de Cervantes, Walter Benjamin — the list goes on and on. Zebra’s father had his own familial manifesto. The first commandment: “Trust nobody and love nothing except literature, the only magnanimous host there is in this decaying world. Seek refuge in it.”
What Maggie Nelson’s The Argonauts did for gender and sexuality, Call Me Zebra does for the experience of exile, deftly threading the narrative with theory while also using theory to pull the reader in. Though Call Me Zebra happens to be fiction, both books are stuffed with complex ideas made irresistible and lyric. Both symbiotically use philosophy to clarify and amplify the human story. “The literature produced by exiles [is designed to] objectify and lend dignity to a condition designed to deny dignity,” Zebra says, citing the postcolonial theorist Edward Said. “By transcribing the literature of such writers we will be restoring dignity not only to literature, but also to ourselves.” A person of no particular nation, Zebra is left situated in her own body and mind. Similar to The Argonauts, there can be some liberation in living beyond an inherited identity. It can also be quite isolating.
The bulk of Call Me Zebra features our bereaved and outspoken protagonist pursuing a literal reverse-exile tour of her family’s anguish. It is a tour of familial erasure and it often only leads her deeper into her own mind. “More than anything else in the world, I felt the need to record the uselessness of my family’s suffering,” Zebra says. “That obligation to share our story, to sound it out as an alarm, had been assigned to me by my dead father and was so exhaustive that it competed with every other rudimentary need: food, sleep, the company of others.” Zebra is obsessed and relentless. She is — in hilarious ways — a lot to handle. Van der Vliet Oloomi sets herself the tall task of writing a precocious narrator, a self-proclaimed “expert connoisseur of literature,” a narrative path that’s littered with prospective pitfalls. In less capable hands, this could easily be annoying or unconvincing, but Zebra is unvaryingly brilliant and deadpan funny.
With a small bit of funding from her American mentor — “Ah,” he notes early in the book, “you have pitched your tent in the same dark forests as I have” — Zebra travels from New York City to Barcelona to Girona to Albanyà. Many writers tend to thrive at a particular scale and rhythm, but Call Me Zebra demonstrates that Van der Vliet Oloomi can write a story of any size. In 2012, Dorothy, a publishing project, released her debut, a surreal murder mystery titled Fra Keeler. Fra Keeler is a novel in a single sustained place and scene as the reader is led by the sleuthing narrator’s acrobatic mind. Call Me Zebra, meanwhile, is an international novel that roves through Iran, Spain, and the United States; it matches Fra Keeler with its obsessive pursuit of meaning, but the pathway this time leads us through world history and halfway around the globe.
As she travels, Zebra takes the saga of both exile and literature on her shoulders. She believes in a “giant literary womb” in which every text is a mutant and a doppelgänger; all books are “connected to one another via nearly invisible superhighways of language.” Literature has evolved through a process of “borrowing, repetition, plagiarism.” Once Zebra starts down this path of finding everything to be connected, she doesn’t stop until everything is included. She calmly explains to another character that instead of the universe absorbing her father upon his death, she later learned she had absorbed him through metempsychosis. Zebra adds, “I’ve recently discovered that I’ve also absorbed traces of my mother through my father, who had absorbed her previously.”
Rather than finding herself represented at each stop on her journey, Zebra is reminded of the manner in which — in a physical sense — exiles are erased. Alienated from her worldly experience, Zebra digs deeper into the inherited ideas of her father’s idols. “I redirected my attention to [Walter] Benjamin,” Zebra says, “a man unafraid of holding a candle to the night in order to measure the immensity of the darkness that surrounds us.”
Though transient and nearly broke, Zebra also finds a variety of ways to anchor her body and mind to the earth. She carries a notebook, for example, that she fills with mantras and maxims from her literary forebears. “I came to myself in a dark wood / for the straight way was lost,” is a line from Dante that serves as a slogan for her journey. Zebra relentlessly rattles off these profound meditations even in the most inopportune of moments. As she and Ludo Bembo, the man she’s sometimes falling in love with, stumble toward the bedroom, she — in between bouts of kissing — quotes the Greek mythological hero Silenus: “What is the best of all is utterly beyond your reach; not to be born, not to be, to be Nothing. But the second best for you is — to die soon.” Ludo stops, takes off his glasses, and rubs his face. She notices he looks tired.
Against her independent spirit and desires, Ludo becomes the most powerful connection Zebra has to the larger physical world. Though fiercely intellectual and compelled toward identifying the macabre in the universe, Zebra also learns “how easily one person can become laced with another.” It is through Ludo that Zebra finds her ragtag gang of fellow exiles, a group that shares her alienated experience and that she hopes will share her efforts to chart their disappearances onto the world. She calls them “The Pilgrims of the Void,” and she paradoxically manages to both force inclusion and make the criteria for membership strict. Prerequisites for participation include experiences of disenfranchisement, rejections, financial or psychic poverty, and voluntary or involuntary exile. On a three-hour hike from Palafrugell to El Far de St. Sebastià, where the Catalan journalist Josep Pla would go to write in his notebook, one member starts crying. “My rash is burning,” she says, “from all the sweat.”
“My dear Remedios, discomfort is a literary experience you have to learn to bear,” Zebra responds. “Imagine how you will feel once you are standing in the center of the void. Terrible! That’s how! You have to build your endurance.”
One of the greatest components of Call Me Zebra is how funny it is. Van der Vliet Oloomi’s narrator is mostly aware of her bizarre nature, but it’s a state she has long and comfortably settled into. Other than Ludo, the most lasting and powerful friend Zebra makes on her reverse-exile journey is a “mongrel” bird that she steals from her borrowed apartment in Barcelona. Despite the bird’s disagreeable attitude, he makes a perfect companion to Zebra. She carries him with her in her suitcase to Girona and Albanyà. At a restaurant, the bird puts his beak to the suitcase’s drilled air holes. The Pilgrims of the Void eat plates of sausages and rice while the bird releases “macabre screams at fixed intervals” throughout the meal.
Confident in her ways and carrying the spirit and intellect of the world’s greatest theorists within her, Zebra is also an expert at telling people off. While Ludo is her lover and a near-equal intellectually, she also feels “sporadically suffocated by his presence.” In one scene, Zebra tells him she has good news and bad news. Which does he want to hear first? He says, “The good news?” already with a general sense of what he’s in for. She tells him he has a benevolent and tender mouth and, to a certain extent, an unruffled spirit. “And the bad?” Zebra tells him he lacks imagination and his mind is as stiff as a stick.
Zebra’s ferocious intellect and razor-sharp wit provide her a certain amount of armor against a world that has disenfranchised and destroyed her family — both her biological and her intellectual one. While in the United States, she receives an endless stream of mail from various universities offering her scholarships. “This is perfectly in keeping with American foreign policy,” Zebra says. “Interfere with and profit from far-flung governments at the peril of their citizens, and once those poor, unfortunate souls have been dispatched to the Four Corners of the World, in exile and on their knees, offer a scattering of them asylum and a compensatory education.” Zebra’s father had long warned her that the world’s numb-skull intellectuals, which form 99.9 percent of all intellectuals, would feed her lies — to spit the lie right back out. She doesn’t take the scholarships. She is her own greatest teacher.
Call Me Zebra also features quietly devastating moments when Zebra’s emotional defenses fall away, when we are reminded that because of tyranny, war, and poverty, she has been left entirely alone to process her family’s eradication from the earth. “There is nothing noble about my suffering,” Zebra observes at one point. “It is the result of an exhaustive investigation into the deepest recesses of human nature — its senselessness and propensity toward fakeness, its lack of honesty.” At times, she finds that the likelihood of being right — about how unjust and cruel the world is — doesn’t necessarily lead to a transcendent place. It simply identifies the reality she is stuck with.
While Zebra is typically the one taking her revenge on the world by “contaminating it with [her] thoughts and [her] suffering,” her compatriots don’t always simply roll over. Late in the book, Ludo quiets Zebra long enough to tell her that the way she copes with her past is unbearable to him, that there are toxic effects to her behavior. While she tries to protest, he tells her he struggles with her sudden disappearances and pathological indifference toward the living. He also dislikes her patterns of consecutive days lying in bed, “stinking up the bedroom as if [she] were a corpse.” Referring to her obsession with the void, he asks, “What are you hoping to find? It’s not a treasure box.”
As Zebra rightly identifies, “a book is a counselor, a multitude of counselors,” but a force that mediates can also be one that separates. One night unable to sleep, she wanders her room, with her bird walking by her heels. She thinks of the words of Albert Camus:
Everything is strange to me, everything without a single person who belongs to me, with no place to heal this wound. I am not from here — not from anywhere else either. And the world has become merely an unknown landscape where my heart can lean on nothing.
This is the sort of thought that might rouse many in the darkness of night. But in Zebra’s case in the morning, Ludo is there.
Ulysses sets off on a Grand Tour of the Mediterranean, Don Quixote on a Grand Tour of Literature, and Dante the Pilgrim on a Grand Tour of Human Nature. Zebra decides she can do all three at once. She largely manages it, in part by eventually giving up some of her absolutism, by accepting that mapping the void is a fundamentally impossible task. Zebra is the smartest narrator you will encounter this year, and she’s smart enough to finally know that she cannot reliably chart meaning in a senseless world. “We can only conquer life a little at a time,” Zebra reflects. “There will always be a remainder out of reach.”
¤
Nathan Scott McNamara also contributes to Literary Hub, The Atlantic, The Millions, the Washington Post, Electric Literature, and more.
CALL ME ZEBRA by Azareen Van der Vliet Oloomi, Book Review
February 3, 2018 by Joanne P 8 Comments
Call Me Zebra is award-winning young author Azareen Van der Vliet Oloomi’s second novel. There has been so much industry buzz about this title. It has featured in all the ‘most anticipated book releases’ lists and the critics have been singing its praises.
Call Me Zebra Azareen Van der Vliet OloomiCall Me Zebra Synopsis:
A novel following a feisty heroine’s quest to reclaim her past through the power of literature—even as she navigates the murkier mysteries of love.
Zebra is the last in a line of anarchists, atheists, and autodidacts. When war came, her family didn’t fight; they took refuge in books. Now alone and in exile, Zebra leaves New York for Barcelona, retracing the journey she and her father made from Iran to the United States years ago.
Books are Zebra’s only companions—until she meets Ludo. Their connection is magnetic; their time together fraught. Zebra overwhelms him with her complex literary theories, her concern with death, and her obsession with history. He thinks she’s unhinged; she thinks he’s pedantic. Neither are wrong; neither can let the other go. They push and pull their way across the Mediterranean, wondering with each turn if their love, or lust, can free Zebra from her past.
(Houghton Mifflin Harcourt)
BOOK REVIEW
Some titles in the literary genre can be challenging to read. Azareen Van der Vliet Oloomi’s Call Me Zebra is one of those titles. But when does the adjective ‘challenging’ become a weakness rather than a strength? It will depend on the reader.
From the opening line of this novel’s first person narrative, often more like an oration,
Illiterates, Abecedarians, Elitists, Rodents all — I will tell you this…
it is clear Zebra is an abrasive character. One of course cannot help but feel sympathy for the immeasurable loss and trauma this character experienced at such a young age, and feelings of exile that persist into adulthood.
I was sure those forgotten fragments of memory, sharpened into spears on the jagged cliffs of time, would inevitably slip out and stab me in the gut. I had no doubt that upon my father’s death I would enter a labyrinth of grief so complex that I may never find the exit.
But, Zebra does little to let people in. She rails against what she perceives as ignorance like a zealot. Her stream of consciousness ramblings are heavy on fatalism and often nihilistic.
What distinguished me was invisible, abstract. It was the feeling of nothingness that I carried with me wherever I went, a void I was convinced they had never experienced and that I, in contradistinction to them, had carried for so long that it had consumed my life. The only way I knew I was alive was by watching the pile of ruin grow, the rubbish attract rubbish until the garbage of my life was insurmountable.
Call Me Zebra is a title I’d only recommend to those with a love for words and language. Bustle described it as “likely to be every book nerd’s bizarre dream”. Without a strong predisposition to finding decadent wordplay, literary quotation and debate fascinating, I would not have persisted with Zebra’s unwieldy, frenetic and often unhinged narrative.
Honestly, there were moments where I had to put this novel aside, when Zebra’s negativity and continual self-sabotage just felt a little too draining. But I kept coming back to it. Why?
In the midst of her most deranged tirades there lurked the darkest of humour. The confluence of Zebra’s anti-social behaviour and unsuspecting citizens offered levity the way one’s curiosity is piqued by an impending train wreck. But mostly because, in addition to innumerable quotes from literary masters, this title is peppered with literary brilliance of the author’s own making. From simple little observations like
Soon I would see Ludo again. I felt as though a hundred horses were galloping across the flat fields of my heart.
to the more philosophical,
… in order for a book to be a good counsellor, I persevered, it must be negotiating a danger zone; there must be a transgression, a leap, a move beyond prohibition.
and from the perspective of an exile
This map, like all maps, is a lie. Literature is the only true form of cartography in the world.
While the story itself lacked the pay-off I had hoped for and I empathised with those in Zebra’s path more than the protagonist herself, I am glad I read to this novel’s conclusion. Call Me Zebra’s narrative was often a little heavy-handed for my tastes, but this extreme and absurdist approach to the exploration of grief and cultural exile is undeniably memorable.
BOOK RATING: The Story 2.5 / 5 ; The Writing 3.5 / 5