- Hardcover: 472 pages
- Publisher: Douglas & McIntyre / Not Applicable (Sep 22 2005)
- Language: English
- ISBN-10: 0865475830
- ISBN-13: 978-0865475830
- Product Dimensions: 23.1 x 15.7 x 3.8 cm
- Shipping Weight: 748 g
- Amazon Bestsellers Rank: #1,617,288 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
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Product Details |
Product Description
From Publishers Weekly
Starred Review. One third On the Road, one third Remembrance of Things Past, one third Sufi mysticism, this dense, heady memoir, the first in a projected four-volume set, tracks the years Zabor spent getting involved with a spiritual commune in the '70s and caring for his dying parents in the 1980s. The narrative is rich, allusive and only loosely chronological; it often skips among the events of several decades within a single chapter. But for fans of Zabor's PEN/Faulkner Award–winning novel, The Bear Comes Home, such intricacies will be part of the book's attraction. A jazz drummer and music critic, Zabor has a great feel for the rhythms and melodies of language, but it is his skill at portraiture that will really lure readers. His descriptions of his father, a Polish Jew who immigrated to Brooklyn in 1938 and stayed in an unhappy marriage in order to be close to his son, are particularly evocative. And his account of his mother's descent into angry senility would be despairing if it weren't so often leavened with humor. The book's few dull moments occur when the author appears alone, with no person upon whom to play his riffs and observations. Religion, or rather the self-conscious struggle to connect earthly experience with the divine, also colors a large part of the book, particularly toward the end. But if Zabor is a mystic, given to visions and dreams, his memoir is nevertheless grounded in the joys, sorrows and many little vanities of ordinary life.
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.
From Booklist
*Starred Review* In Africa, people who drive Mercedes are called the Wabenzi, a tribe Brooklynite Zabor hopes to join at the outset of this polyrhythmic remembrance as he plans to revisit Turkey in style. But his entrancing, tragicomic story covers so much rugged and mysterious terrain, from his father's exodus from Nazi-occupied Poland to Zabor's fraught childhood (when he was still called Joel) to Sufi teachings, he hasn't yet left on his journey at the conclusion of this gorgeously jazzy autobiography, the first of four planned volumes. Swinging deliriously from the elegiac to the ecstatic as he riffs on traumatic family history and three years of hell in the early 1980s when he cared for his catastrophically ill parents, Zabor's hard-driving composition is so charged with fantastic characters, improbable events, and resplendent metaphors, it possesses the same rambunctious and uncommon power as his PEN/Faulkner Award-winning novel The Bear Comes Home (1997). Zabor's ravishing style derives from his experiences as a jazz drummer and his immersion in the practices of the whirling dervishes of Turkey, and for sheer soaring beauty of imaginative language and illumination of the plexus between the mundane and the spiritual, Zabor's pyrotechnic recollection is glorious. Donna Seaman
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved
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Most Helpful Customer Reviews on Amazon.com (beta)
Amazon.com:
4.7 out of 5 stars (3 customer reviews)
8 of 8 people found the following review helpful
4.0 out of 5 stars
Not easy to read, but worth the trouble, Sep 25 2005
By Marilyn Dalrymple "MaLing" - Published on Amazon.com
This review is from: I, Wabenzi: A Souvenir (Hardcover)
Intelligent and well written, Wabenzi: A Souvenir reveals the life of the author, Rafi Zabor, to readers. Zabor's words tell of incidents in his life- happenings - that affected him. The death of his parents, the memory of his, " . . . ghostly grandmother - with her salty fingers, claw-like hands, sallow hollow cheeks, loose false teeth, . . .." The meeting of a girl friend's older brother who was named Jack Shema, but became to be known as Hakki Bey, the boy who was brilliant, artistic, self destructive and beat his sister from time-to-time. He tells of Sharon, the sister whom he took to Tokyo for an abortion.Zabor tells his experiences and memories lyrically and honestly. Many passages are compelling. Some of the writing is long winded, however, and my interest waned. but something always pulled me back into the story. Zabor shows readers the world as he sees it competently and interestingly. He admits that he does not clearly understand everything that happens in his life and this confession allows readers to identify with him. How many of us understand our lives?
Through detailed and sensitive writing Wabenzi: A Souvenir allows readers to get inside his mind to see what he sees, feel what he feels and he lets readers contemplate his regrets along with him.
Zabor is a jazz drummer and that's how he writes - with improvisation and a forceful rhythm. I enjoyed Zabor's writing most when he talked about his passion - music. That's where the best writing comes from, passion.
Reading Wabenzi: A Souvenir will take some work. It is not and easy read, but it is worthwhile.
6 of 7 people found the following review helpful
5.0 out of 5 stars
A Powerful, if Incomplete, "Memoir", Oct 20 2005
By Lawrence Baldwin - Published on Amazon.com
Amazon Verified Purchase(What's this?)
This review is from: I, Wabenzi: A Souvenir (Hardcover)
From the dust jacket, we learn that Rafi's autobiographical "Memoir" is planned to stretch to four volumes. Indeed, this volume gets him only as far as England in his planned trip to Turkey, and he never acquires the Mercedes Benz which inspires the book's title. But as with much travel, the enjoyment is in the sights and sounds while getting there.Rafi's at times dizzying prose has matured since his Pen Faulkner Award-winning "The Bear Comes Home," and I frequently found myself startled at the power of an image limned in a few deft words. At the same time, his emotional honesty is shocking and at times painful.
The heart of the book is in two sustained flashbacks--one concerning his Jewish family, a tragicomic portrayal with depth and compassion, and the second concerning his participation in a Sufi spiritual community in rural England. Having some experience with this latter, I am startled by its accuracy, showing both flawed humans with good will and foibles and an environment that invites profound, life-changing experiences. Each part is a masterpiece, and I for one eagerly await the remaining volumes.
4 of 6 people found the following review helpful
5.0 out of 5 stars
A Wonderful, Mysterious Book, Oct 26 2005
By Eric Wagner ""Read more, learn more, chan... - Published on Amazon.com
Amazon Verified Purchase(What's this?)
This review is from: I, Wabenzi: A Souvenir (Hardcover)
I thoroughly enjoyed Rafi's new book. I've loved Rafi's writing since reading some of his stuff in Musician in the 1970's, and I found it fascinating to learn more about his life. This book takes many interesting twists and turns, and I eagerly await the remaining volumes.
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