Call Me Zebra

by Azareen Van der Vliet Oloomi

Overview

From an award-winning young author, 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.
 
An adventure tale, a love story, and a paean to the power of language and literature starring a heroine as quirky as Don Quixote, as introspective as Virginia Woolf, as whip-smart as Miranda July, and as spirited as Frances Ha, Call Me Zebra will establish Van der Vliet Oloomi as an author “on the verge of developing a whole new literature movement” (Bustle). 

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780544944152
Publisher:	HarperCollins Publishers
Publication date:	02/06/2018
Sold by:	HARPERCOLLINS
Format:	eBook
Pages:	304
Sales rank:	228,197
File size:	7 MB

About the Author

AZAREEN VAN DER VLIET OLOOMI is the author of the novels Fra Keeler and Call Me Zebra, and an Assistant Professor in the M.F.A. Program in Creative Writing at the University of Notre Dame. She is the winner of a 2015 Whiting Writers’ Award, a National Book Foundation “5 Under 35” honoree, and the recipient of a Fulbright Fellowship, as well as residency fellowships from MacDowell and Ledig House. Her work has appeared in the Paris Review, Guernica, Granta, BOMB, and elsewhere. She has lived in New York, Los Angeles, Tehran, Dubai, Valencia, Barcelona, and currently splits her time between South Bend, Indiana and Florence, Italy.

Read an Excerpt

Prologue
The Story of My Ill-Fated Origins

Illiterates, Abecedarians, Elitists, Rodents all​—I will tell you this: I, Zebra, born Bibi Abbas Abbas Hosseini on a scorching August day in 1982, am a descendent of a long line of self-taught men who repeatedly abandoned their capital, Tehran, where blood has been washed with blood for a hundred years, to take refuge in Nowshahr, in the languid, damp regions of Mazandaran. There, hemmed in by the rugged green slopes of the Elborz Mountains and surrounded by ample fields of rice, cotton, and tea, my forbearers pursued the life of the mind.

There, too, I was born and lived the early part of my life.

My father, Abbas Abbas Hosseini​—​multilingual translator of great and small works of literature, man with a thick mustache fashioned after Nietzsche’s—was in charge of my education. He taught me Spanish, Italian, Catalan, Hebrew, Turkish, Arabic, English, Farsi, French, German. I was taught to know the languages of the oppressed and the oppressors because, according to my father, and to my father’s father, and to his father before that, the wheels of history are always turning and there is no knowing who will be run over next. I picked up languages the way some people pick up viruses. I was armed with literature.

As a family, we possess a great deal of intelligence​—​a kind of superintellect—​but we came into this world, one after the other, during the era when Nietzsche famously said that God is dead. We believe that death is the reason why we have always been so terribly shortchanged when it comes to luck. We are ill-fated, destined to wander in perpetual exile across a world hostile to our intelligence. In fact, possessing an agile intellect with literary overtones has only served to worsen our fate. But it is what we know and have. We are convinced that ink runs through our veins instead of blood.

My father was educated by three generations of self-taught philosophers, poets, and painters: his father, Dalir Abbas Hosseini; his grandfather, Arman Abbas Hosseini; his great-grandfather, Shams Abbas Hosseini. Our family emblem, inspired by Sumerian seals of bygone days, consists of a clay cylinder engraved with three As framed within a circle; the As stand for our most treasured roles, listed here in order of importance: Autodidacts, Anarchists, Atheists. The following motto is engraved underneath the cylinder: In this false world, we guard our lives with our deaths.

The motto also appears at the bottom of a still life of a mallard hung from a noose, completed by my great-great-grandfather, Shams Abbas Hosseini, in the aftermath of Iran’s failed Constitutional Revolution at the turn of the twentieth century. Upon finishing the painting, he pointed at it with his cane, nearly bludgeoning the mallard’s face with its tip and, his voice simultaneously crackling with disillusionment and fuming with rage, famously declared to his son, my great-grandfather, Arman Abbas Hosseini, “Death is coming, but we literati will remain as succulent as this wild duck!”

This seemingly futile moment marked the beginning of our long journey toward nothingness, into the craggy pits of this measly universe. Generation after generation, our bodies have been coated with the dust of death. Our hearts have been extinguished, our lives leveled. We are weary, as thin as rakes, hacked into pieces. But we believe our duty is to persevere against a world hell-bent on eliminating the few who dare to sprout in the collective manure of degenerate humans. That’s where I come into the picture. I—​astonished and amazed at the magnitude of the darkness that surrounds us—am the last in a long line of valiant thinkers.

Upon my birth, the fifth of August 1982, and on its anniversary every year thereafter, as a rite of passage, my father, Abbas Abbas Hosseini, whispered a monologue titled “A Manifesto of Historical Time and the Corrected Philosophy of Iranian History: A Hosseini Secret” into my ear. I include it here, transcribed verbatim from memory.
 Ill-omened child, I present you with the long and the short of our afflicted country, Iran: Supposed Land of the Aryans.

In 550 BC, Cyrus the Great, King of the Four Corners of the World, brave and benevolent man, set out on a military campaign from the kingdom of Anshan in Parsa near the Gulf, site of the famous ruins of Persepolis, to conquer the Medes and the Lydians and the Babylonians. Darius and Xerxes the Great, his most famous successors, continued erecting the commodious empire their father had begun through the peaceful seizing of neighboring peoples. But just as facts are overtaken by other facts, all great rulers are eclipsed by their envious competitors. Search the world east to west, north to south; nowhere will you find a shortage of tyrants, all expertly trained to sniff out weak prey. Eventually, Cyrus the Great’s line of ruling progeny came to an end with Alexander the Great, virile youth whose legacy was, in turn, overshadowed by a long line of new conquerors, each of whom briefly took pleasure in the rubble of dynasties past.

Every one of us in Iran is a hybrid individual best described as a residue of a composite of fallen empires. If you were to look at us collectively, you would see a voluble and troubled nation. Imagine a person with multiple heads and a corresponding number of arms and legs. How is such a person, one body composed of so many, supposed to conduct herself? She will spend a lifetime beating her heads against one another, lifting up one pair of her arms in order to strangle the head of another.

We, the people—​varied, troubled, heterogeneous​—have been scrambling like cockroaches across this land for centuries without receiving so much as a nod from our diverse rulers. They have never looked at us; they have only ever looked in the mirror.

What is the consequence of such disregard? An eternal return of uprisings followed by mass murder and suffocating repression. I could not say which of the two is worse. In the words of Yevgeny Zamyatin: Revolutions are infinite.

By the twentieth century, the Persian empire’s frontiers had been hammered so far back that the demarcating boundary of our shrunken nation was bruised; it was black and blue! Every fool knows that in order to keep surviving that which expands has to contract. Just look at the human heart. My own, reduced to a stone upon the double deaths of my father and my father’s father, both murdered by our so-called leaders, is plump and fleshy again; your birth has sent fresh blood rushing through its corridors.

Hear me, child: The details of the history of our nation are nothing but a useless inventory of facts unless they are used to illuminate the wretched nature of our universal condition. The core of the matter, the point of this notable monologue, is to expose the artful manipulation of historical time through the creation of false narratives rendered as truth and exercised by the world’s rulers with expert precision for hundreds of years. Think of our own leaders’ lies as exhibit A. Let us shuffle through them one by one.

When the century was still young, our people attempted the Constitutional Revolution but failed. In time, that failure produced the infamous Reza Shah Pahlavi, who ruled the country with thuggery and intimidation. Years later, during the Second World War, Mr. Pahlavi was sent into exile by the British, those nosy and relentless chasers of money—​those thieves, if we’re being honest. And what, child, do you think happened then? Pahlavi’s son, Mohammad Reza Shah Pahlavi, who was greener than a tree in summer, stepped up to the throne.

Claiming to be the metaphysical descendent of the benevolent Cyrus the Great, the visionary Mohammad Reza Shah Pahlavi, anointed himself the “King of Kings” and launched the White Revolution, a chain of reforms designed to yank the country’s citizens into modernity by hook or by crook.

Editorial Reviews

12/01/2017
Escaping persecution and destruction during the Iran-Iraq War of the 1980s, Zebra's parents flee their home in Iran. Zebra is born while they are en route to Turkey, and her father immediately begins her education by reciting quotations of famous writers and thinkers, instilling in her a love of literature. Her family is one of readers; their family crest is inscribed with three As for autodidacts, atheists, and anarchists. Unfortunately, Zebra becomes an orphan at a relatively early age, and she begins a quixotic search for the meaning of life. Arriving in Barcelona, Spain, she meets Ludovico Bembo, with whom she has a magnetic connection. After a brief time of living together, he declares his love for her, but Zebra is unable to reciprocate. As she walks around Barcelona, whose art and architecture have special meaning for her, she soon realizes that the greatest revenge in life is to feel tremendous love and to persist and prevail. VERDICT This fierce meditation on life and love, a tour de force by self-proclaimed literary terrorist Oloomi (Fra Keeler), is one that many will read and reread.—Lisa Rohrbaugh, Leetonia Community P.L., OH

Library Journal

★ 11/20/2017
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.)

Publishers Weekly

Praise for Call Me Zebra
Named a Most Anticipated Title of 2018 by Nylon, Book Riot, The Millions, and Hello Giggles
Named a Most Anticipated Fiction Title of 2018 by Bustle and Bitch
Named a Most Anticipated Title by a Woman of Color in 2018 by Electric Literature
Named a Most Anticipated Literary Fiction Title of Spring 2018 by Publishers Weekly
Named a Most Anticipated Fiction Title of Winter 2018 by iBooks

"Not many authors are compared to Borges, Cervantes, and Kathy Acker all in one breath, but that is exactly what we're dealing with here: Azareen Van der Vliet Oloomi is a twisted, twisty genius, whose latest novel is a wild, trippy ride across countries…[Zebra] is in possession of an inimitable…voice, but it’s all the better to help her—and us—navigate the chaos of this collapsing world."—Nylon

" It’s difficult to pull off both depth and wit, but Azareen Van der Vliet Oloomi masters both in Call Me Zebra." — Bitch

"One of the most original stories we’ve read in a long time...A delight for the true bibliophile." —Hello Giggles

"Oloomi wears her weighty intellectual bona fides lightly...Filled with literature, art and sex, Call Me Zebra is rambling and picaresque as quirky and funny as its rambunctious narrator. Its many digressions into philosophy and history are not obstacles—they are stepping-stones...With a healthy dose of literary allusions and excerpts, Call Me Zebra is a vibrant novel of a young woman's odyssey into her family's legacy of exile and erudition."—Shelf Awareness

“A darkly, funny novel…[and] bombastic homage to the metacriticism of Borges, the Romantic absurdity of Cervantes, and the punk-rock autofictions of Kathy Acker…[Call Me Zebra] is a brilliant, demented, and bizarro book that demands and rewards all the attention a reader might dare to give it.”—Kirkus Reviews (Starred Review)

“Oloomi’s rich and delightful novel… crackles throughout with wit and absurdity… [Call Me Zebra] is a sharp and genuinely fun picaresque, employing humor and poignancy side-by-side to tell an original and memorable story.”—Publishers Weekly (Starred Review)

"This fierce meditation, a heady review of literature and philosophy as well as a love story, is a tour de force from the author of Fra Keeler that many will read and reread."—Library Journal

"An arresting exploration of grief alongside a powder keg of a romance."—Booklist

"Zebra is exile as education, history as passion, life as literature, and literature as death."
—Tom McCarthy, author of the Man Booker Prize-finalist Satin Island and Remainder

"A penniless orphaned refugee, Zebra knows she can count on two things: literature and death. She builds a fortress out of both, surviving on fury, on memories and manifestos, until life begins to break through. Can Zebra handle life? Can literature handle Zebra? Reader, go find out! Call Me Zebra is like nothing else I've read, geo-political and bookish and sexy, quite refreshingly nuts and yet a ripping good read. Also, there's a stolen bird! I'd say I couldn't put it down, but Zebra would never approve a cliche, so I'll pay it a compliment she might actually accept: this book metabolized me."
—Danielle Dutton, author of Margaret the First

"There’s something really radical about this epic and ecstatic quest. It’s in the tradition of Cervantes’ ingenious nobleman, but also deeply in conversation with Borges’s Pierre Menard and Kathy Acker’s own Don Quixote. The young female narrator of Call Me Zebra luxuriates in the tradition of Enrique Vila-Matas’s literary sickness, or Kafka writing that he is made entirely of literature. A hilarious picaresque, perverse and voracious."
—Kate Zambreno, author of Heroines and Green Girl

“Call Me Zebra is a book about everything—exile, love, loss, literary theory, the insouciance of time, the history of Iran, funerary rites, and the idiosyncrasies and intricacies of the mind. In the main character, Zebra, we receive ‘a scribe of the future,’ one who can synthesize great swathes of literature, history, and politics to produce insights that transcend categorization, insights that illuminate existence, its ascending flights and horrors. Azareen Van der Vliet Oloomi, the author of Call Me Zebra, has written a marvelous book that is at once contemporary, in conversation with fiction writers such as Valeria Luiselli and Rachel Kushner, and simultaneously reaches back to the eccentric talkers and characters in the work of Vladimir Nabokov and Italo Svevo. Call Me Zebra risks the grand, the large, the sublime as a means of answering the questions we speak only to ourselves when we think no one is listening.”
—Roger Reeves, author of King Me

“This novel is not about a zebra but about a whole sharp, amazing, malicious and wicked zoo. Please enjoy responsibly.”
—Quim Monzó, author of A Thousand Morons  and supporting character in the novel Call Me Zebra

Praise for Azareen Van der Vliet Oloomi and Fra Keeler
Winner of the Whiting Award, 2015
National Book Foundation “5 Under 35” Honoree, 2015
A Slate Overlooked Book of 2013
 
“[An] exciting debut…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…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.” —Los Angeles Times
 
“Oloomi enters so fully and sympathetically into the mad logic of her narrator that scenic detail, chronology, cause and effect, and even such mundane props as cactus, mailman, and ringing phone are bent, doubled, or subsumed by the paranoid geometries of meaning he draws…Subtly menacing, but not without humor, the novel derives momentum and tension from the space between its clear, intelligent language and the absolute unreliability of its narrator.” —Slate
 
“Surreal…The lines that separate the living and the dead are blurred, revealing that perhaps the past is more present than it seems.” —Mashable
 
“Van de Vliet Oloomi’s spare, clear language sets this novel apart…Fra Keeler reminded me of Rivka Galchen’s Atmospheric Disturbances, Roberto Bolaño’s The Third Reich, and Jean-Philippe Toussaint’s Reticence, not to mention big classics like Crime and Punishment and Lolita.” —The Millions
 
“Mysterious, experimental, and surreal; [Van der Vliet Oloomi] crafts sentences so beautifully and unexpectedly that it’s no wonder she’s catching people’s attention…She might just be on the verge of developing a whole new literature movement.” —Bustle
 
“The book is a pleasure to read…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.” —Bookslut
 
“A rare gem of a book that begs to be read again.” —Publishers Weekly

From the Publisher

★ 2017-11-28
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.This is a brilliant, demented, and bizarro book that demands and rewards all the attention a reader might dare to give it.

Kirkus Reviews