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    Call Me Zebra
    Call Me Zebra
    Call Me Zebra
    Audiobook12 hours

    Call Me Zebra

    Written by Azareen Van der Vliet Oloomi

    Narrated by Leila Buck

    3.5/5

    ()

    About this audiobook

    From an award-winning young author, a novel following a feisty heroine's idiosyncratic quest to reclaim her past by mining the wisdom of her literary icons-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).

    Editor's Note

    Award winner…

    Winner of the 2019 PEN/Faulkner Award, which honors the best American writing. “Once in a while a singular, adventurous, and intellectually humorous voice appears that takes us on an inescapable journey. … In today’s visual Netflix world, Ms. Van der Vliet Oloomi’s novel performs at the highest of levels in accomplishing only what the written novel can show us,” the judges wrote of “Call Me Zebra.”

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherRecorded Books, Inc.
    Release dateFeb 6, 2018
    ISBN9781501977954
    Author

    Azareen Van der Vliet Oloomi

    AZAREEN VAN DER VLIET OLOOMI is the author of the novels Savage Tongues, Call Me Zebra, and Fra Keeler and the director of the MFA Program in Creative Writing at the University of Notre Dame. She is a National Book Foundation “5 Under 35” honoree and the winner of a 2019 PEN/Faulkner Award, a John Gardner Award, and a 2015 Whiting Award, as well as the recipient of a Fulbright Fellowship and residency fellowships from MacDowell and Ledig House. Her work has appeared in the New York Times, the Paris Review, Guernica, Granta, Bomb, and elsewhere. She lives in Chicago and is the founder of Literatures of Annihilation, Exile and Resistance, a lecture series on the global Middle East that focuses on literature shaped by colonialism, military domination, and state-sanctioned violence.  

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    Reviews for Call Me Zebra

    3.5/5

    40 ratings3 reviews

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    • 2/5


      As a young girl, Zebra fled Iran with her father. The journey from their once comfortable, book-filled home to their eventual haven in a small New York apartment is a difficult one. After her father's death, Zebra decides to make the same journey in reverse, revisiting the places they traveled through on their way to America. Her first destination is Barcelona, where she meets an Italian professor, and changes her plans.

      I've been examining my response to this book and trying to determine what factors caused me to hate it so very much. Sure, the writing was turgid and ponderous, with no noun left unmolested by a pair of adjectives, no sentence left without ample decoration, yet I love Victorian Lit, which tends towards embellished prose. Sure, the protagonist was just the worst, a self-involved pedant who spends the entirety of the novel treating others like things, stealing from them while contemptuously thinking about how much better she is than everyone else, but I do like novels about unlikeable characters, even the ones who are so without redeeming qualities that the reader spends the novel hoping to see them get what they deserve. There's a pretentiousness to the writing that feels unearned, names are dropped without much rhyme or reason, but this normally would not get more than an occasional eye-roll from me.

      I don't know why I disliked this book so much. It's gotten some good reviews and, hey, it was published in the first place, so people more knowledgeable than myself clearly see something in it. Maybe read it for yourself and then come tell me what I missed.
    • 5/5
      Zebra is taught to memorize books from an early age, when she is born in a library in Iran. Zebra goes through a lot, that is mostly alluded to, when she has to walk to the border to get out of Iran with her dad -- this takes months --and then they drift through other places for many years, feeling less and less like themselves. Zebra's father dies early in the book and Zebra is largely already alienated from other people, so she goes on a Grand Tour of Exile, to retrace her steps she took around the world as a child, but also to pay homage to many of her favorite literary persons and walk their paths. Zebra puts intelligence above all, especially as she feels that "in the wake of the Islamic Republic of Iran... there had been a near total physical and psychic massacre of the country's leading thinkers, writers, intellectuals." (page 223) Zebra's intelligence is one of the last things that remain with her and one of the few things that can't be taken from her. So her intelligence is on an extreme level. I think the main problem people will have with the book: Zebra's attitude and voice. Zebra is a bit pretentious (someone she is close with even calls her pretentious towards the end of the book). I think if the writer made Zebra less irritating, people would be more willing to stick with the book. But this is Zebra. She is the result of her experiences. Everything a person endures shapes their character. There are many other irritating characters in other books that didn't survive warzones. I am willing to give a character more slack in their personality if they have been through things. I am much more willing to give Zebra a break than I am to the jerks in 'Fates and Furies' by Lauren Groff or the entitled kid in 'The Goldfinch' by Donna Tartt. I can see why Zebra might be annoying to some, but her voice is a unique one. Therefore, the writing is unique. To me, she is more interesting the way she is. Zebra is supposed to be a frustrating, difficult person. This isn't a book where the plot is at the forefront. I can see what the writer was trying to do here and I think she 1,000% nailed it. There are quite a few great lines in the book. It's interesting to me the writer tries to make this a funny book while the base is so heartbreaking. It's hard to laugh when you know what Zebra has been through. But possibly this is part of the point? In interviews, the writer says Zebra's story is an exaggeration of her own life. I don't know if it's because I'm close in age to the writer, or so many of the things that Zebra says hit home for me, but this book is certainly for me. Zebra might be a know-it-all but there are reasons for that explained in the book if you get far enough. In one moment, another character asks Zebra "how have you been?" and Zebra realizes no one has asked her this before. It's entirely heartbreaking but also says so much about how she became who she is. And I find examples like this throughout. Knowledge is her shield from a world she feels isn't on her side. This isn't a perfect book but I definitely can appreciate the humor, heart and the unique voice of Zebra and her insight. It seems my main point of this review is to defend and make excuses for Zebra, but I feel the book (and Zebra) deserve more of a chance if you can have patience with Zebra as I know that will be the main issue many have with the book. This reminds me of Flannery O'Connor' s eccentric characters (mostly Wise Blood): heartbreaking and hilarious at the same time. Also, Bartleby by Melville, Kafka, A Brave Man Seven Storeys Tall, A Confederacy of Dunces, A Line Made By Walking.... possibly All the Birds, Singing.
    • 2/5
      2019 TOB--This book was not for me. I probably wouldn't have finished it if it hadn't been in the TOB. I read a blurb from the author in which she says she hopes people laugh when they read this book. But she didn't make the character comical--she made her pitiful, arrogant, sad and totally unlikable. Thinly plot driven--primarily character driven and I hated the character.