Zeiton by Dave Eggers

Dave Eggers always distracts me from whatever I am doing with his compulsively readable books. Fortunately I read this at night (all in one sitting) so all it interfered with in my life was a night of sleep.

This book is a chronicle of one family's experience after Hurricane Katrina. Abdulrahman (the husband) is a Syrian-American who decides to stay in New Orleans during the hurricane to look after the properties his family owns and manages. His wife Kathy and their children evacuate when the mayor suggests it.

First Abdul takes care of his own house and possessions, then starts to paddle around New Orleans helping out people in his neighborhood. Kathy and the children make it to a family member's house outside the flood zone. They both expect their lives to go back to normal reasonably quickly, but then things take an unusual turn.

As New Orleans succumbs to the issues that followed Katrina we are familiar with (overcrowding in the Superdome, lack of proper medical and evacuation resources, looting, rioting, etc), Kathy and the children remain away from Abdul, traveling to a friend's home in Phoenix. Abdul continues to help his friends and neighbors, then suddenly Kathy loses touch with him. The balance of the book is what happened to each of them after they lose touch. Interspersed with the narrative is a lot of Abdul's personal and family history. The book ends with a followup of where the family is in 2008, several years later.

Eggers' superb writing aside, this book was incredibly interesting as all my knowledge about Katrina had been from sources like CNN and a recent story in the New York Times Magazine (http://www.nytimes.com/indexes/2009/08/30/magazine/index.html). This look at one family's story was a new point of view for me. Abdul and Kathy were Muslim which also put an interesting twist on the story - on more than one occasion, other people who were angry or overwhelmed with their own situations wanted to blame the state that New Orleans was in on terrorists.

The other things about this book that held my attention were the parallels I could draw between it and Saramago's Blindness. These books both dealt with what happens in an environment when the usual social services and government are overwhelmed and typical life is no longer possible. Saramago did it by blinding a city while in this story Katrina provided the impetus, but in both cases the behavior of the citizens and the people in charge was, literally, unbelievable.

Tom Piazza's City of Refuge is on my reading list and I think I'll read it sooner rather than later so I can compare that to this.