Available:*
Library | Call Number | Status |
|---|---|---|
Searching... Lake Elmo Library | FICTION KOC | Searching... Unknown |
Searching... Oakdale Library | FICTION KOC | Searching... Unknown |
Searching... Park Grove Library (Cottage Grove) | FICTION KOC | Searching... Unknown |
Searching... R.H. Stafford Library (Woodbury) | FICTION KOC | Searching... Unknown |
Searching... Wildwood Library (Mahtomedi) | FICTION KOC | Searching... Unknown |
Bound With These Titles
On Order
Summary
Summary
"Funny, razor-sharp, and full of juicy tales that feel urgent and illicit . . . the author has created a singular, resonant voice, an American teenager raised by Old World Afghan storytellers." --New York Times Book Review
"More than well crafted; it's phenomenal. . . . Kochai's book has a big heart." -- The Guardian
A dog on the loose. A boy yearning to connect to his family's roots. A country in the midst of great change. And a vibrant exploration of the power of stories--the ones we tell each other and the ones we find ourselves in.
Twelve-year-old Marwand's memories from his previous visit to Afghanistan six years ago center on his contentious relationship with Budabash, the terrifying but beloved dog who guards his extended family's compound in the rural village of Logar. But eager for an ally in this place that is meant to be "home," Marwand misreads his reunion with the dog and approaches Budabash the way he would any pet on his American suburban block--and the results are disastrous: Marwand loses a finger, and Budabash escapes into the night.
Marwand is not chastened and doubles down on his desire to fit in here. He must get the dog back, and the resulting search is a gripping and vivid adventure story, a lyrical, funny, and surprisingly tender coming-of-age journey across contemporary Afghanistan that blends the bravado and vulnerability of a boy's teenage years with an homage to familial oral tradition and calls to mind One Thousand and One Nights yet speaks with a voice all its own.
Author Notes
Jamil Jan Kochai was born in Pakistan and grew up in the United States. His story "Nights in Logar," upon which this debut novel is based, won the 2018 O. Henry Prize. He currently attends the Iowa Writers' Workshop.
Reviews (6)
Publisher's Weekly Review
Kochai's debut is an imaginative, enthralling, and lyrical exploration of coming home-and coming-of-age-set amid the political tensions of modern Afghanistan. Twelve-year-old Marwand returns to his family's village of Logar in 2005-and on the very first day, has the tip of his index finger bitten off by the compound's fearsome guard dog, Budabash. Marwand, with his cousin, two "little uncles," and younger brother, then vow "jihad against Budabash"-as soon as they can find the runaway hound. The seemingly Huck Finn-like tale, however, slowly evolves into a mesmerizing collection of stories, first narrated by Marwand (who recounts the vicious beating he gave an old mutt when the family first settled in Afghanistan in 1999) and set against the backdrop of a war-torn region. Through nightly conversations in the family compound, Marwand discovers that talk "always seemed to circle back to war." His 99-day-long search for the devil dog Budabash is filled with the stories of events both real and imagined: a family wedding, a mysterious illness that takes down the household, and finally the dreamlike clash between Marwand and Budabash. Kochai is a masterful storyteller, and will leave readers eager for the next tale. (Jan.) c Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.
Booklist Review
Kochai's debut chronicles the adventures of 12-year-old Marwand on a summer trip from the U.S. to the village of Logar, in Afghanistan, to visit family. Marwand quickly falls in with his two young uncles, Gul and Dawood, and his cousin Zia, and runs afoul of the family's guard dog, Budabash, who he tormented on a visit six years prior. Budabash lashes out at Marwand, biting off the tip of one of his fingers, and then runs off. Marwand, Gul, Dawood, and Zia set off to find the dog, venturing out into an Afghanistan still overrun with American soldiers and the resurgent Taliban. Along the way, the boys both hear and recount stories, painting a portrait of a country beset by occupying forces and internal unrest yet buoyed by a rich cultural history and a resilient population. Kochai captures the joys and the sorrows of life in Afghanistan, offering readers a glimpse into everyday life in a country whose people have grown so used to constant bombardment that they can differentiate between various types of IEDs by sound alone.--Kristine Huntley Copyright 2018 Booklist
New York Review of Books Review
Alessandro DAvenia is a best-selling author in his native Italy and around the world. He has many fans and gives TED Talks, in which he speaks just as he writes. In a publishing world that rewards E. L. James and Dan Brown with millions in sales while many devotees of craft and language labor in poverty, D'Avenia is a star. His third novel, "What Hell Is Not," based on a true story and translated by Jeremy Parzen, follows Federico, a bookish teenager from Palermo who, just before a summer of study in England, is recruited by his teacher, the kind Don Pino, to mentor children in a poor neighborhood plagued by Mafia violence. Federico wants to read, to write, to fall in love. Don Pino offers wisdom, hope and goodness. Any potential for a profound narrative in this promising setup is thwarted by the writing, which is bloated and indulgent. The book's dreamy musings and vague scenes are laden with metaphors so mixed it can require several reads just to take in their true awfulness. Federico pines for a girl: "She's the one who rummages through his heart, in the tangle where dreams grow. Things bathed in too much light cast the same amount of shadow. Every light has its grieving." Abeat later: "He covers his acerbic face with his hands, as if he could feel his visage with his fingers. He resembles a sailor on the pier as he waits for a contract following mandatory shore leave.... He allows light, wind and salt to reshape his flesh and thoughts." It is difficult to know whom to blame, author or translator, for the manic descriptions, desperate reflections and mangled aphorisms. Who thought "trots along like a sleepwalker" (try to picture that) or "a bullet is instant destiny" should be written down in any language? But Parzen didn't create this frightful simile: "Life seems like those textbook equations whose solutions are found in the lower right hand of the page, framed by parentheses. But he never gets the procedure right. And it worries him that two minuses make a plus and a minus and a plus a minus." The novel's images are contorted, its metaphors removed from the physical world. "Curtains flap like snakes against the heat-besieged windows." Humanity "explodes like a seed." (Do snakes flap, the reader asks, or seeds explode?) Every dead thing is compared to fish, every dark or mysterious thing to Arabs. As a woman is raped, "her eyes are like those of a fish dumped out onto the shore," and D'Avenia ends the chapter thus, as if to preen: "A piece of meat in a piece of meat can wound just as much." Translation is a tricky business, but did this grotesque analogy sound O.K. in Italian? D'Avenia's authorial style may be "more is more," but even when no words are needed, he still offers a dozen: "The Hunter doesn't utter a word. Attitude is all someone with power needs and words only get in the way unless they are absolutely necessary." Never have I read a more unintentionally ironic sentence. D'Avenia's relationship to simile is misguided and cynical: used to obfuscate, not clarify. Federico, styled as a poet, claims to love "the metaphor that dislocates reality." But the purpose of rhetoric isn't to dislodge; it is to ground. Kenneth Burke famously wrote that metaphor "brings out the thisness of a that, or the thatness of a this," to make the intangible tangible. Nothing in this novel is tangible. Page after page, the reader senses that something has gone terribly wrong here. Somewhere between the writing, editing and translation the audience has been dismissed, and all beauty murdered like poor Don Pino. The question of audience is answered more deliberately by Jamil Jan Kochai, an Iowa M.F.A. candidate whose debut novel, "99 Nights in Logar," is crafted with care, respect and a hard-earned and profound understanding of its readership. It is funny, razor-sharp and full of juicy tales that feel urgent and illicit, turning the reader into a lucky, trilingual fly on the wall in a family loaded with secrets and prone to acquiring more. The narrator, 12-year-old Marwand, is returning from America with his brothers and parents to his family's compound in Logar province in eastern Afghanistan, where over the course of 99 days he reconnects with a house full of saucy and callused aunts and uncles, crashes a wedding in a stolen burqa, has his finger bitten off and his Coolpix stolen, and gets lost in a deathly maze of compounds that may or may not be a hallucination. The novel opens with four boys running away from their distracted parents to search for a rabid old dog from whom Marwand seeks forgiveness for tortures past. But in 2005, Afghanistan is wild, full of killers: "The psychopathic white boys, the ravenous bandits, the Ts and the gunmen and the drug runners, the kidney kidnappers, the robots in the sky." The ensuing adventure is witty and engaging, somewhat allegorical, thrumming with the histories of foreign wars and with memories of lives lost and childhoods cut short. When Marwand's father is tempted to stay in the States, his wife reminds him of their own culpability, living and working there. "I don't support the invaders," he says, thinking of the excesses of American bases, the heroin, the chai boys. And yet, the family's return to America is inevitable; this is only a single nostalgic summer spent marrying off daughters, sharing platters of rice and remembering. The novel is constructed out of spoken stories within stories, each more embellished than the last ("It's O.K. to change a story a little if you can make it better"), shared over evening chai, or while waiting for help on the roadside, or watching explosions on a distant mountain. One character narrates until he can't continue, Marwand tells us, and at "the point in the story I most wanted to hear, someone else took a sip of his chai and began his own story, and so on and so forth, until everyone was given a say and not a single story was actually finished." When Marwand argues to his father that American TV has tales just as good as the ones told in Logar, his father says, "But not our stories." And that is precisely the point. While the novel is written in English, it deprioritizes the Western reader. This is its most interesting accomplishment: It ignores the Western gaze, despite Kochai's firm grasp of its prose standards. The author has created a singular, resonant voice, an American teenager raised by Old World Afghan storytellers. He mixes Farsi and English and Pashto without the expectation that any one reader (except another Marwand) will understand all of it. There is an exoticism in the technique of peppering foreign words into English texts, then promptly translating them - a repetition much like breaking the fourth wall. But here are Farsi words untranslated for the reader, used only where Marwand would naturally speak in that tongue. Consider this sentence: "Although an imam had made the nikkah between Khaista and Atal official, giving them the holy right to" - insert sexual expletive - "as much as they pleased, poor Khaista was beset by her six idiot brothers, whose ghairat revealed itself only in times of ease or during opportunities for cruelty." The American reader doesn't need an interpreter in order to relish this voice, but an Afghan-American will enjoy it many times more. "Wallah," the band of cousins swear to one another, again and again - and that word evokes many of our childhoods. The final story, a sacred family tale about the death of a beloved uncle, a story foreshadowed throughout, is written entirely in Pashto script. This bold choice doesn't take away from the present narrative any more than do Scheherazade's elisions from her story, but the tale does enrich the novel for those who can read it - here is a secret reserved for some. Unlike the token applepolishing uncle, Kochai doesn't offer anything to the Americans for cheap. How refreshing that Kochai isn't posturing for the West, though he knows just how to entrance its reader. His images are precise, in harmony with the physical world. He doesn't dabble in Eastern melodrama unless he's satirizing. "This one time, at a wedding, Ruhollah Maamaa was having trouble with an AK during a machine-gun celebration": Such a sentence can only end riotously for a family whose rooster is named George Bush. Kochai has created an exciting and true voice, a young American proudly telling stories of his Afghan grandparents, of his cousins and brothers, without the need for Western approval. He doesn't alter a single word for their comfort, describing, for example, "hair so deeply brown it was almost blond," because, to us, brown is lighter than average. In that way, he respects his global audience all the more, while still claiming Afghan stories for Afghans. The success and failure of Kochai's and D'Avenia's novels, respectively, both published for Western readers, depend on their regard for that audience. One novel doesn't bother with any reader at all, while the other knowingly, respectfully looks another way. ? dina nayeri is the author, most recently, of "Refuge." Her next book, "The Ungrateful Refugee," will be published this year.
Guardian Review
In this phenomenal debut, a boy's epic quest across his war-torn country serves as an act of remembrance for a forgotten people There is a myth propagated by much of the western press that the current Afghan troubles started after 9/11, when the then Taliban government refused to hand over Osama bin Laden to the United States. What did they expect? Actually, the endless Afghan war started 22 years earlier, when the Soviet army invaded Afghanistan to prop up a fledgling communist government. Many western and Muslim countries came together to pour money into what became a multinational jihad network in and around Afghanistan. What did they expect? Professional Afghan watchers may have noticed that the province of Logar increasingly shows up not only in news feeds but in the memoirs and fictions of American veterans. In these books, US soldiers go hunting Afghans and in the process develop PTSD, return home and get a degree and write deeply moving stuff about war. These works of literature are as well crafted as their weaponry. They usually show us the beating heart of the poor American soldier caught up in a conflict not of their own making. In his debut novel, 25-year-old Jamil Jan Kochai, who was born in Pakistan and grew up in the US, has written a book that tells the story of those being hunted. It's something more than well crafted; it's phenomenal. The year is 2005, and 12-year-old Marwand returns to his village in Logar along with his parents and two younger siblings. He has been in the US for six years, but now he feels he is back where he belongs. As an outsider and a guest, he is feted by his extended family and reunited with legions of cousins, all growing up in a constant war. He is also reunited with Budabash, the wolflike family dog he used to playfully tease. One day when he approaches, Budabash bites off the tip of his finger and later disappears: Marwand and three of his cousins set out to bring the dog back. During their epic journey they find out more about their land and people and history. This is more than a coming-of-age novel. It delves into Afghanistan's past by retelling its stories But this is more than a coming-of-age novel. It delves into Afghanistan's past by retelling its stories, as Marwand's adventures are punctuated by the tales that extended families tell each other. There are stories branching out of stories: of past battles and shit-eating jinns, of impossible journeys and encounters with Soviet invaders, of reluctant Taliban and willing Afghan collaborators, stories of those who refuse to pick up a gun and themselves become a story. Many of these stories are breathtaking. Some are as scary as waiting for a bomb to fall, or for a lost son to return; others are as tender as a little flower that survives the Daisy Cutters. The only way to endure an unending war is to remember its stories, to remember those who disappeared. Besides being a cracking read, this novel is an act of remembrance for a people the world has forgotten. And it shows that killing other people's children to ensure the safety of our own is not an adequate security policy. Kochai's book has a big heart. He works on a vast canvas, cramming cousins of cousins into every scene and making them distinctive. Women and young girls may be covered in burqas, but they have fully developed personalities. He has a keen eye for class distinctions between the families, and evolving relationships. The fabled Afghan code of honour and strict religiosity is laid to rest here, as some pray, some don't and some pretend to. People lie and cheat; sometimes they don't know what to do but wait. These characters are good at waiting. Although the main narrator has a distinctive and hilarious American teenager's voice, Kochai draws on Persian and Pushto as well as local dialects to keep telling these stories and keep moving ahead with his own. When reading writers from places such as Afghanistan we burden them with the additional expectation of bringing us revelations that we are too lazy to find in our news feeds. And here Kochai rises to the task with a truth that three generations of thinktanks, after hundreds of billions in war effort and more billions in aid effort, haven't been able to unearth. While battling to survive a freak flood and find the wolf dog that took away his finger, Marwand says: "Wallah, I am sick of this war that I can't win and can't afford to lose."
Kirkus Review
An absorbing portrait of life in contemporary Afghanistan that is simultaneously raucous and heart-rending, told from a perspective we rarely hear: that of a young migr returning home to his war-torn country.In his debut novel, Kochai tells the story of Marwand, a 12-year-old whose family has returned to their home province of Logar, just south of American-occupied Kabul, at the height of the war on terror. Marwand hasn't been to his ancestral home since he was 6; he's an American boy who barely knows life in Logar. Worse, the landscape feels like anything but home: American bases and checkpoints pockmark the land as the central government in Kabul tries to tamp down a raging insurgency, and Taliban fighters roam Logar with impunity. Holed up in his mother's family compound and looking for some comfort, Marwand tries to pet the family dog, Budabashonly to find the wolflike animal less agreeable than the dogs he's used to in America. Budabash bites off a bit of his finger and runs away. Convinced that Budabash is a demon in disguise, Marwand sets out with a band of cousins to track the dog down and bring him back home. But that plot is really just an excuse for an extravagant outpouring of storytelling: Marwand encounters an enormous cast of aunts, uncles, cousins, and grandparents, all of whom have stories to tell about their family and the bloody history of the land they call home. The result is a novel that reads like a thrilling collision of Huckleberry Finn, Boccacio's The Decameron, and One Thousand and One Nights. As it careens between tragic stories of Afghanistan's history of perpetual warfare and magical realist tales of djinn, the novel threatens to become unwieldy at times, but Marwand is the thread that holds it together. Endowed with a voice that is at once street-smart and innocent, the boy speaks a language that is distinctly Afghan but retains the marks of his life as an American preteen. When his little brother, Gwora, demands to follow Marwand and his cousins on their quest to find Budabash, Marwand beats him into submission: "After the whupping, I left him in the orchard all crumpled up," he boasts, "...while me and the rest of the fellahs headed out onto the roads of Logar to search all day long for the wolf-dog who, just a few weeks ago, had bitten the tip off my index finger." Marwand's is the voice of an American kid who speaks a bit of Pakhto and whose favorite word happens to be "Wallah!" When Marwand and his cousins hide on top of a roof of the compound to eavesdrop on a conversation or don burqas so they can sneak into a bride's wedding party in search of a cousin's betrothed, the book seems like the very echo of Huckleberry Finn. With beautiful prose that encompasses the brutality of life in Afghanistan without overshadowing the warmth of family, culture, and storytelling, Kochai delivers a gorgeous and kaleidoscopic portrait of a land we're used to seeing through a single, insufficient lens: the war on terror.A vivid and moving novel about heritage, history, and the family bonds that transcend culture. Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Library Journal Review
DEBUT Part coming-of-age story and part contemporary history of Afghanistan, Kochai's debut novel is told in an episodic style reminiscent of The Arabian Nights. When 12-year-old Marwand returns to Afghanistan with his parents and brothers to see extended family, his first order of business is to visit the compound's menacing guard dog, Budabesh, who clearly has not forgotten a previous beating by Marwand and proceeds to bite off half of his index finger. The dog then escapes. From there the story is ostensibly about Marwand's search for the animal, but it eventually evolves into a picaresque tale, with Marwand and his crew encountering a cast of eccentric characters and landing in precarious, sometimes violent situations. What is real and what is imagined can be hard to ascertain. In the end, this is a work about family. Though war stains most of their shared history, their allegiance to one another stays constant. VERDICT While the writing is beautiful throughout, this novel ultimately asks a lot of the reader. Its chimerical nature may be a bit off-putting, and several scenes of animal cruelty can be tough to read. Still, libraries specializing in world literature will want to have this on hand as a fine example of the meeting of modern and traditional storytelling. [See Prepub Alert, 7/9/18.]-Stephen Schmidt, Greenwich Lib., CT © Copyright 2019. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
Excerpts
Excerpts
On the Thirty-Second Morning Budabash got free sometime in the night. We didn't know how. Just that he did and that we needed to go and find him. Me and Gul and Zia and Dawood heading out onto the roads of Logar, together, for the first time, hoping to get Budabash back home before nightfall. This all happened only a few weeks into my trip, my family's homecoming in the summer of '05, back when it cost only a G to fly across the ocean, from Sac to SF to Taipei to Karachi to Peshawar all the way up to Logar, where, at the time, though it wasn't dead, the American war was sort of dozing, like in a coma, or as if it were still reeling off a contact high from that recently booming Afghan H, leaving the soldiers and the bandits and the robots almost harmless. So that all that mattered then for a musafir from America was how he was going to go about killing another hot summer day. Gulbuddin said it'd be a four-man operation. He said it in Pakhto because my Farsi was shit. "You see," he told me, Zia, and Dawood as we huddled in the orchard before our chase, "more than four and we'll look like a mob, but any less and we might get jumped." Gul sat at the head of our circle, twirling one end of the thick black mustache his older sisters were always trying to tear from his lip because it made him look too much like the beautiful Turkish gangsters from their soap operas. From where he was sitting--up against the mud wall that ran between the courtyard and the orchard--he could spy on all the apple trees and the cow's pen and the big blue gate and even the very corner of the orchard where Budabash once sat and slept and ate my god-damn finger. Gul was my little uncle. About fourteen. The oldest of our bunch. "What about four and a half?" I said, thinking about my little brother. "What did I just say, Marwand?" "More than four is a mob," Dawood answered. "But an extra half might come in useful," I said. "Not the half you're talking about," Dawood said, squatting at the farthest edge of our circle, taking up too much space. Dawood was my other little uncle. Around twelve years old. Same as me. "Listen, fellahs," I went on. "Five is a good number. Five pillars. Five prayers. Five players on a basketball team." "Only five?" Zia asked. "Well, is it four and a half or five?" Dawood asked. "Futball is better," Zia said. "In futball everyone gets to play." "What do you think?" I looked to Zia. He was my cousin. Rahmutallah Maamaa's oldest kid. Probably thirteen--though you could never be too sure with the kids in Logar. But Zia just shrugged his skinny shoulders and aimed the barrels of his fingers at Gulbuddin. "Chik, chik," Zia said, "pow, pow," and pulled his triggers twice. Gulbuddin nodded at Zia and pressed down on the air with his hands. His eyes, green like duck shit, shifted from us, to the gate, to the courtyard, where the rest of the family still slept. We quieted down. "We'll put it to a vote," he said. "Raise your hand if you want Gwora to come along." Dawood rubbed his skinned head as if he were going to vote for Gwora but couldn't make up his mind. Zia's scrawny fingers stayed nestled in his lap, counting out the ninety-nine names of Allah. Gul didn't even move. Only my busted hand went up into that morning chill. "Well, fuck," I muttered in English, and relented to the will of the jirga. With my little brother rejected, I didn't say much else for the rest of the meeting as they shifted, almost rapid fire, from one topic to the next: how to start, where to look, where to stop, where Dawood would sniff, when Zia would pray, what Gul would chance if we met a marine or a djinn or a bandit or one of our other uncles who'd already gone ahead of us on the chase. "We go out. We find Budabash. We bring him home," Gul said. "Simple as that. Dawood does some sniffing. I ask a few questions. Zia says a few prayers. And if we run into Rahmutallah, Marwand makes sure we don't get whupped. Right, Marwand?" Rahmutallah Maamaa--my oldest uncle--was already out on the road looking for Budabash. Had he caught us that day, I was supposed to tell him that our mission was my idea. "Okay," I said. "I'll lie." "You swear to God you'll lie?" Dawood said. "Don't say it unless you mean it," Gul said. "You'll be bound by Allah," Zia added. Gul and Dawood made pistols with their fingers and pointed them at my chest. I made a pistol too but put it to the temple of my head. "Wallah," I said, cocking my finger. "I won't snitch." Gul laughed and reached for my hands and put them between his own. "All right," he said, being careful with the gauze wrapped around my torn finger. "We were just joking, you see, a joke for the road. You understand?" I said that I did. After we gathered our supplies--biscuits and apples, four small knives wrapped in butcher paper, eight water bottles, the first siparah of the Quran, a packet of matches, two notebooks me and Gwora filled up with our observations on Budabash, four bundles of rope, duct tape, and my Coolpix--we headed out toward the big blue gate, and it was there, at the threshold of the gate and the road, the compound and the village, that Gwora, my little brother, caught me slipping. He stumbled into the orchard, his arms filled with a jumble of papers and notebooks, howling about our work, our agreement, and pleading for me to take him along. I explained to Gwora in English, real calm, that he couldn't come, that it wasn't up to me; but he wouldn't listen, wouldn't understand, and all that time the fellahs were watching me from the gate, whispering to one another in Farsi, until I told him one last time, in Pakhto, why he had to stay home, and when that also didn't work, I showed him why. It didn't take long. After the whupping, I left Gwora in the orchard all crumpled up, trying again and again not to cry, while me and the rest of the fellahs headed out onto the roads of Logar to search all day long for the wolf-dog who, just a few weeks ago, had bitten the tip off my index finger. Excerpted from 99 Nights in Logar by Jamil Jan Kochai All rights reserved by the original copyright owners. Excerpts are provided for display purposes only and may not be reproduced, reprinted or distributed without the written permission of the publisher.
