CONTRAPPOSTO, Dave Eggers' long-time-coming novel of art, friendship, and artists being friends

CONTRAPPOSTO
DAVE EGGERS
Alfred A. Knopf (non-affiliate Bookshop.org link)
$14.99 ebook, available

Rating: 4* of five

The Publisher Says: Cricket is just a shy kid who likes drawing when he first meets Olympia. She's older, more confident; she bullies him into some light vandalism and instantly he's in love. When they're together, they talk about their futures, how they're going to travel the world, the beauty and rapture of art.

Then those futures start to arrive in unexpected ways, the years and decades pile up between them, the art world seduces and disappoints and frustrates them. And they have to figure out, again and again, what it is to be an artist, and who and what to love.

This is a wild and beautiful novel about two friends who believe they can change the world, if only they can start their own movement, dodge charlatans, remain open-eyed and open-hearted, avoid going mad, avoid dying young of rare cancers, stay true to their ideals and never tire of beauty. Not easy, but not impossible, either.

I RECEIVED A DRC FROM THE PUBLISHER VIA NETGALLEY. THANK YOU.

My Review: "Contrapposto" is first used as an English art-vocabulary word loaned to us by the Italians in 1903. (I love etymonline.com!) As the MCs in this story are artistic types, it's the appropriate term to reach for:

"Contrapposto is an Italian term translating to 'counterpose.' It describes a natural, relaxed pose in which a human figure’s weight shifts onto one foot. This shift causes the shoulders and hips to tilt in opposite directions, creating a gentle, dynamic S-curve along the spine."

I myownself kept thinking in terms of the centuries-older borrowing of "counterpoise" with its weight and its mass as Pia/Olympia and Robert/"Cricket" level each other out, one on the up when the other's weighed down. Their connection begins when they're quite young with all the ridiculous grandiosity of young idealistic artsy-fartsy kids, determined to Show The World without knowing yet what the world bothers to look at.

I thought, based on the publisher's description, I was in for a revamp of Author Eggers' memoir A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius, of which I was not fond. I had a similarly not-positive response to What is the What. I then really, really liked Zeitoun, and have missed his other work; when offered this DRC it felt right to get in the swing of modern Eggers. I hoped more Zeitouny fun would be had; it was.

Stylistically, Eggers has moved himself into a groove that affords us the pithiest and most aperçu-worthy prose that is down the middle of the public's strike zone. The story of two people whose connection forms and reforms over many years as they each grown into life-shapes strongly influenced by each other, by their artsy-fartsy lives...pursued in part so as to impress and please the other...and ultimately by the certainty that, no matter what, they belong in tension, harmony, response, connection to each other. Some friendships just *are*. If they just *are* they can feel closer than family, and that's the friendship Pia and Cricket have from the get-go. The issue I take with that, even though it matches my own lived experience of some rare friendships, is that here it comes across a bit like "manic pixie dream girl" tropishness from the Aughties. Pia zooming unattainably into and out of Cricket's life, always on to something new something wild someone else not him, leading him (almost but never fully leading him on) into or out of trouble...it's heartfelt, feels real enough, but really is not free of the tinge of the trope.

As a sly comment on the male expectations of our time, as a sneering smirk at the people who make up the elite in the artworld, this is a fine little story. It's very quotable. I stopped at one because much as I liked many of them, they all, when assembled, seemes repetitious of point. I didn't notice it as I read and marked them. I call that a vote of confidence on my readerly part; especially since I wasn't consciously aware of it until writing this review.

Way to sneak one over on me! I'm very impressed. A full four stars for a story that felt until just now like three-and-a-half; decent-to-good, not great. I think this sly story will win many hearts and tap on the glass of many a mind in the Zoo of Life. It should. It deserves your time and your treasure.

On sale, though.

ZEITOUN, Hurricane Katrina's nasty cover-up of systemic racism

ZEITOUN
Dave Eggers
McSweeney's
$12.00 hardcover, available now

Rating: 5* of five

The Publisher Says: When Hurricane Katrina struck New Orleans, Abdulrahman Zeitoun, a prosperous Syrian-American and father of four, chose to stay through the storm to protect his house and contracting business. In the days after the storm, he traveled the flooded streets in a secondhand canoe, passing on supplies and helping those he could. A week later, on September 6, 2005, Zeitoun abruptly disappeared.

Eggers’s riveting nonfiction book, three years in the making, explores Zeitoun’s roots in Syria, his marriage to Kathy — an American who converted to Islam — and their children, and the surreal atmosphere (in New Orleans and the United States generally) in which what happened to Abdulrahman Zeitoun was possible. Like What Is the What, Zeitoun was written in close collaboration with its subjects and involved vast research — in this case, in the United States, Spain, and Syria.

My Review: Okay. I herewith open my piehole for the crow to be inserted. I have said nasty, judgmental things about Eggers's writings, and I meant each and every one of them. I still do.

But this book is excellent, and this book is Eggers's, so it is obvious that the old adage about a stopped clock being right twice a day applies to writers and writing as well.

It's a direct, elegantly simple telling of the nightmare side of the American Dream. It's powerfully focused, unlike every other one of Eggers's overpraised books that I've read, and it's superbly structured, with no room for improvement in pacing and character development that I can find.

I don't believe I'm typing these things, someone reassure me that this is *me*! Every criticism I've leveled at this guy's previous writing is out the window! Will they turn off the gravity next?

But truth is truth, and honesty compels me to say: I haven't enjoyed a book this much in ages. Well, enjoyed is a strange term to use for the true and factual, and awful, story of a decent, honorable man made the butt of society's opprobrium for no reason other than his religion and origins. But the book is deeply enjoyable, because at every turn, Zeitoun's decency and honor and integrity shine through. That alone makes the book worth buying and reading. Add to that the fact that, rare in this world failed of kindness, Zeitoun summons the best and the most positive people to him in his desperate hours.

I am disappointed that Twilight *shudder* and The Life of Pi *retch*, vastly inferior books to this one, and to name but two of the many, many books this applies to, have more copies on Goodreads.

Please...do your part to change this, and go buy a copy. Then read it. It will, contrary to any expectation you might have, leave you uplifted and happier for having read a book about Hurricane Katrina and an Arab immigrant. Very strongly recommended.

And, thanks to my friend Terri for making me read this...even sending me a copy...one it will be extremely hard to release back into the bookosphere. That I will *have* to buy a replacement is a small economic price to pay.

********Addendum in 2013: Yes indeed, Zeitoun has been arrested and accused of crimes recently, and many have taken this as an invalidation of his post-Katrina experiences. Apparently no thought is given to what these experiences of injustice in The Home of The Free might be expected to do to a man is irrelevant to those who hold this opinion. That's just bad, sloppy thinking. What happened to Zeitoun after Katrina is still real, and his story of that time is still one of a horrifying miscarriage of justice using "race" as a flimsy, transparent attempt at justification.

And of course, from the vantage point of 2017, the story never quite got better, as Kathy Zeitoun alleged a long pattern of domestic abuse, attempted to have Zeitoun re-arrested, etc. etc. Again...and again...and again it must be said that, even if every awful thing ever said about the man is true, none of it excuses the horrors he experienced at the hands of the legal system.