American War: A Novel - Couverture souple

El Akkad, Omar

Couverture souple

ISBN 10 : 1101973137 ISBN 13 : 9781101973134

Editeur : Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group, 2018

A propos du livre

Extrait :

Chapter One
 
 
I was happy then.
 
The sun broke through a pilgrimage of clouds and cast its unblinking eye upon the Mississippi Sea.

The coastal waters were brown and still. The sea’s mouth opened wide over ruined marshland, and every year grew wider, the water picking away at the silt and sand and clay, until the old riverside plantations and plastics factories and marine railways became unstable. Before the buildings slid into the water for good, they were stripped of their usable parts by the delta’s last holdout residents. The water swallowed the land. To the southeast, the once-glorious city of New Orleans became a well within the walls of its levees. The baptismal rites of a new America.

A little girl, six years old, sat on the porch of her family's home under a clapboard awning. She held a plastic container of honey, which was made in the shape of a bear. From the top of its head golden liquid slid out onto the cheap pine floorboard.

The girl poured the honey into the wood’s deep knots and watched the serpentine manner in which the liquid took to the contours of its new surroundings. This is her earliest memory, the moment she begins.

And this is how, in those moments when the bitterness subsides, I choose to remember her. A child.

I wish I had known her then, in those years when she was still unbroken.

“Sara Chestnut, what do you think you're doing?” said the girl's mother, standing behind her near the door of the shipping container in which the Chestnuts made their home. “What did I tell you about wasting what's not yours to waste?”

“Sorry, Mama.”

“Did you work to buy that honey, hmm? No, I didn't think you did. Go get your sister and get your butt to breakfast before your daddy leaves.”

“OK, Mama,” the girl said, handing back the half-empty container. She ducked past her mother, who patted dirt from the seat of her fleur-de-lis dress.

Her name was Sara T. Chestnut but she called herself Sarat. The latter was born of a misunderstanding at the schoolhouse earlier that year. The new kindergarten teacher accidentally read the girl's middle initial as the last letter of her first name—Sarat. To the little girl's ears, the new name had a bite to it. Sara ended with an impotent exhale, a fading ahh that disappeared into the air. Sarat snapped shut like a bear trap. A few months later, the school shut down, most of the teachers and students forced northward by the encroaching war. But the name stuck.
Sarat.
 
A hundred feet from the western riverbank, the Chestnuts lived in a corrugated steel container salvaged from a nearby shipyard. Wedges of steel plating anchored to cement blocks below the ground held the home in place. At the corners, a brown rust crept slowly outwards, incubated in ceaseless humidity.

            A lattice of old-fashioned solar panels lined the entirety of the roof, save for one corner occupied by a rainwater tank. A tarp rested near the panels. When storms approached, the tarp was pulled over the roof with ropes tied to its ends and laced through hooks. By guiding the rainfall away from the panels to the tank and, when it overfilled, toward the land and river below, the family was able to collect drinking water and defend their home from rust and decay.

Sometimes, during winter storms, the family took shelter on the porch, where the awning sagged and leaked, but spared them the unbearable acoustics of the shipping container under heavy rain, which sounded like the bowl of a calypso drum.

In the summer, when their house felt like a steel kiln, the family spent much of their time outdoors. It was during this extended season, which burned from March through mid-December, that Sarat, her twin Dana, and her older brother Simon experienced their purest instances of childhood joy. Under the distant watch of their parents, the children would fill buckets of water from the river and use them to drench the clay embankment until it became a slide. Entire afternoons and evenings were spent this way: the children careening down the greased earth into the river and climbing back up with the aid of a knotted rope; squealing with delight on the way down, their backsides leaving deep grooves in the clay.

In a coop behind the house the family kept an emaciated clutch of chickens. They were loud and moved nervously, their feathers dirty and brown. When they were fed and the weather was not too hot, they produced eggs. In other times, if they were on the edge of revolt or death, they were preemptively slaughtered, their necks pinned down between the nails of a nearby stump.

The shipping container was segmented by standing clapboards. Benjamin and Martina Chestnut lived in the back of the home. Simon and the twins shared the middle third, living in a peace which grew more and more uneasy as Simon neared his ninth birthday and the girls their seventh.
In the final third of the home there was a small kitchen table of sand-colored plywood, smeared and notched from years of heavy use. Near the table a pine pantry and jelly cabinet held sweet potatoes, rice, bags of chips and sugar cereal, pecans, flour, and pebbles of grain milled from the sorghum fields that separated the Chestnuts from their nearest neighbor. In a compact fridge that burdened the solar panels, the family kept milk and butter and cans of old Coke.

By the front door, a statue from the days of Benjamin's childhood kept vigil. It was the Virgin of Guadalupe, cast in ceramic, her hands pressed against each other, her head lowered in prayer. A beaded bouquet of yellow tickseed and white water lilies lay at her feet, alongside a melted, magnolia-scented candle. When the flowers died and hardened the children were sent out to the fields to find more.

Sarat skipped past the statue, looking for her sister. She found her in the back of the house, standing on her parents' bed, inspecting with steel concentration her reflection in the oval vanity mirror. She had taken one of her mother's house dresses, a simple sleeveless tunic whose violet color held despite countless washings. The little girl wore the top half of the dress, which covered the entirety of her frame; the rest of the garment slid limply off the bed and onto the floor. She had applied, far too generously, her mother's cherry red lipstick—the jewel of the simple makeup set her mother owned but rarely used. Despite employing utmost delicacy, Dana could not keep within the lines of her small pink lips, and looked now as though she'd hastily eaten a strawberry pie.

“Come play with me,” Sarat said, confounded by what her twin was doing.

Dana turned to her sister, annoyed. “I'm busy,” she said.

“But I'm bored.”

“I'm being a lady!”

Dana returned to her mirror, trying to wipe some of the lipstick with the back of her hand.

“Mama says we have to go have breakfast with daddy now.”

“OK, oh-kay,” Dana said. “Not a moment peace in this house,” she added, misquoting a thing she'd heard her mother say on occasion.
 
Sarat was the second-born girl, five and a half minutes behind her sister. And although she'd been told by her parents that both she and Dana were made of the same flesh, Dana was her father's girl, with his easygoing wit and sincere smile. Sarat was made of her mother: stubborn, hard, undaunted by calamity. They were twins but they were not alike. Sarat often heard her mother use the word tomboy to describe her. God gave me two children at once, she said, but only girl enough for one.
 
For a few minutes, after Dana had left, Sarat remained in her parents' room. She observed with some confusion the thing her sister had smeared all over her lips. Unlike the river and the bush and the beasts and birds of the natural world, the lipstick did not interest her; it held no promise of adventure. She knew it only as a prop in her twin sister's ongoing obsession with adulthood. Why Dana wished so desperately to join the ranks of the fully grown, Sarat could not understand.

Dana emerged from the house, still draped in her mother's clothes.

“Didn't I tell you not to go opening my dresser?” Martina said.

“Sorry, Mama.”

“Don't sorry me—and pull it up, you're dragging dirt everywhere.” Martina pulled the dress off her daughter. “I send your sister in to get you, and now you're out here looking like a mess, and she's inside probably doing the same.”

“She can't put makeup on,” said Dana. “She's ugly.”

Martina knelt down and grabbed her daughter by the shoulders. “Don't ever say that, you hear me? Don't ever call her ugly, don't ever say a bad word about her. She's your sister. She's a beautiful girl.”

Dana lowered her head and pouted. Martina cupped her jaw and lifted her head back up.

“Listen to me,” she said. “You go back inside and you tell her. You tell her she's a beautiful girl.”

Dana stomped back inside the house. She found her sister putting her mother's lipstick back in the makeup box.

“You're a beautiful girl,” Dana said, and stormed out the room.

For a moment, Sarat stood dumbstruck. She was a child still and the purpose of a lie eluded her. She couldn't yet fathom that someone would say something if they didn't believe it. She smiled.
 
Outside, Martina cooked breakfast on a heavy firewood stove. On the plates and in the bowls there were hard biscuits and sorghum cereal and fried eggs and pepper bacon cooked till crisp in its own fat.

In her slumping cheeks and dark-circled eyes, Martina's thirty-nine years were plainly visible—more so than in the face of her husband, although he was five years her senior and the two of them had lived half their lives together. She was wide around her midsection but not obese, with an organic rural fitness that made her able, when it was necessary, to lift heavy loads and walk long distances. Unlike her husband, who had sneaked into the country from Mexico as a child, she was not an immigrant. She was born into the place she lived.

“Breakfast!” Martina shouted, wiping the sweat from her brow with a ragged dish towel. “Get over here now, all of you. I won't say it again.”

Benjamin emerged from behind the house, freshly shaven and showered in the family's outdoor stall.

“Hurry up and eat before he gets here,” Martina said.

“It's all right, relax,” her husband replied. “When's he ever been on time?”

“Where's your good tie?”

“It's not a job interview, just a work permit. I'm only going to a government office; no different than the post office.”

“When was the last time people killed one another to get something from a post office?”

Benjamin sat at the table in the yard. He was a lean man with a lean face, his near-touching brows anchoring a smooth, large forehead made larger by setting baldness at the temples. He was at all times clean-shaven, save for a thin black mustache his wife worried made him look unseemly.

He kissed Sarat on the forehead and, when he saw his other daughter, her face smeared with red, kissed her too.

“Your girls been at it again,” Martina said. “Won't learn manners, won't do what they're told.”

Benjamin shook his head at Dana with mock disapproval, then he leaned close to her ear.

“I think it looks good on you,” he whispered.

“Thanks, Daddy,” Dana whispered back.

The family assembled around the table. Martina called out for Simon and soon he came around the front porch, carrying in his hands the recently sawed bottom half of the family's ten-rung ladder.

Seeing the look on his mother's face, the eight-year-old blurted, “Dad asked me to do it.”

Martina turned to her husband, who bit happily into the bacon and drank the sour, grainy coffee. It was rancid stuff from the ration packs, designed to keep soldiers awake.

“Don't look at me like that, Smith needs a ladder,” Benjamin said. “Got new shingles to put up; old ones have all gone to mush.”

“So you're going to give him half of ours?”

“It's a fair enough deal, considering he's the one who knows the man at the permit office. Without him, we may as well try to shoot our way across the border.”

“He's got enough money to buy himself a million ladders,” said Martina. “I thought you said he was doing us a favor.”

Benjamin chuckled. “A Northern work permit for half a ladder is still a favor.”

Martina poured the last of her coffee in the dirt. “We need to get up and fix our roof just the same as the Smiths,” she said.

“We don't need any more than a five-rung ladder to do it,” Benjamin replied, “especially now that our own boy's grown tall and strong enough to get himself up there.”

It was a point with which Simon vehemently agreed, promising his mother he'd climb up regularly to add chlorine to the tank and clean the bird dung from the solar panels, just like his father did.

The family ate together. Benjamin, rail-thin his whole life, inhaled the bacon and eggs with shameless appetite. His son looked on, cataloging his father's every minute ritual into an ironclad manual of what it means to be a man. Soon the boy too had wiped his plate clean.

 The twins sipped orange juice from plastic cups and picked at their biscuits until their mother softened them with a smear of butter and apricot jam, and then they ate quietly, deep in guarded thought.

Martina watched her husband, her eyes still and silent, a look her children mistook for hardness but her husband knew to be just how she was.

Finally she said, “Don't tell them nothing about doing any work for the Free Southerners.”

“It's no secret,” Benjamin replied. “They know full well every man around these parts has done some work for the Free Southerners. Doesn't mean I picked up a rifle for them.”

“But you don't have to say it. If you say it then they have to check one of the boxes on the form and take you into another room and ask you all kinds of other questions. And then in the end they won't give you a permit on account of security reasons or whatever they call it. Just say you work in the shirt factory, that's not a lie.”

“Quit worrying so much,” Benjamin said, leaning back in his seat and picking the stray meat from between his teeth. “They'll give us a permit. The North needs workers, we need work.”

Simon interjected, “Why do we need to go to the North? We don't know anybody up there.”

“They got jobs there,” his mother replied. “They got schools there. You're always complaining about not having enough toys, enough friends, enough everything. Well, up there they have plenty.”

“Tyler says going to the North is for traitors. Says they should hang.”

Sarat listened intently to the conversation, filing the strange new word in her mind. Traitors. It sounded exotic. A foreign tribe, perhaps.

“Don't talk like that,” Martina said. “You going to listen to your mother or a ten-year old boy?”

Simon looked down at his plate and mumbled, “Tyler's dad told him.”

Revue de presse :

“Follow the tributaries of today’s political combat a few decades into the future and you might arrive at something as terrifying as Omar El Akkad’s debut novel, American War. Across these scarred pages rages the clash that many of us are anxiously speculating about in the Trump era: a nation riven by irreconcilable ideologies, alienated by entrenched suspicions. . . . both poignant and horrifying.”
—Ron Charles, The Washington Post

“Whether read as a cautionary tale of partisanship run amok, an allegory of past conflicts or a study of the psychology of war, American War is a deeply unsettling novel. The only comfort the story offers is that it’s a work of fiction. For the time being, anyway.”
—Justin Cronin, The New York Times Book Review
 
“El Akkad . . . has an innate (and depressingly timely) feel for the textural details of dystopia; if only his grim near-future fantasy didn’t feel so much like a crystal ball.” 
—Leah Greenblat, Entertainment Weekly

“Powerful . . . If violence and conflict feel distant, journalist Omar El Akkad’s debut novel brings them home. . . . Despite its future setting, it’d feel wrong to call American War a work of science fiction. Hell, it’d even feel off to call it dystopian, given that it’s so few steps removed from our reality.”
—Kevin Nguyen, GQ

“American War is an extraordinary novel. El Akkad’s story of a family caught up in the collapse of an empire is as harrowing as it is brilliant, and has an air of terrible relevance in these partisan times.”
—Emily St. John Mandel, author of Station Eleven

“El Akkad has created a brilliantly well-crafted, profoundly shattering saga of one family’s suffering in a world of brutal power struggles, terrorism, ignorance, and vengeance. American War is a gripping, unsparing, and essential novel for dangerously contentious times.”
—Donna Seaman, Booklist (starred review)

“Terrifyingly plausible . . . Part family chronicle, part apocalyptic fable, American War is a vivid narrative of a country collapsing in on itself.”
—Publishers Weekly (starred review)
 
“Gripping and frightening . . . Well written, inventive, and engaging, this relentlessly dark tale introduces a fascinating character. . . . Highly recommended.”
—James Coan, Library Journal (starred review)

“Striking . . . A most unusual novel, one featuring a gripping plot and an elegiac narrative tone.”
—Rayyan Al-Shawaf, The Boston Globe

“Sarat is a fascinating character. . . . Thought-provoking [and] earnest . . . El Akkad’s formidable talent is to offer up a stinging rebuke of the distance with which the United States sometimes views current disasters, which are always happening somewhere else. Not this time.”
—Jeff VanderMeer, Los Angeles Times
 
“Depicting a world uncomfortably close to the one we live in, American War is as captivating as it is deeply frightening.”
—Jarry Lee, Buzzfeed.com
 
“American War is terrifying in its prescient vision of the future.”
—Maris Kreizman, New York magazine/Vulture

“Astounding, gripping and eerily believable . . . masterful . . . Both the story and the writing are lucid, succinct, powerful and persuasive.”
—Lawrence Hill, The Globe and Mail (Toronto)

“Ambitious . . . [a] complex, thoroughly imagined domestic dystopia.”
—Terra Arnone, National Post (Toronto)
  
“Omar El Akkad has created an American future that is both terrifying and plausible. In a world seared and flooded by global warming, the U.S. has fractured again into North and South. The barbarism that ensues is all the more awful because we know the rivers and the cities. And we know these people: they are our neighbors; they are us. Through the eyes of a young girl El Akkad lets us see the soul-crushing toll of war. It was only in the stunned minutes after I’d finished the novel that I realized he had also taught us how to make a consummate terrorist.”
—Peter Heller, author of The Dog Stars and Celine
 
“American War, a work of a singular, grand, brilliant imagination, is a warning shot across the bow of the United States. Omar El Akkad has created a novel that isn’t afraid to be a pleasurable yarn as it delves into the hidden currents of American culture and extrapolates from them to envision a deeply tragic potential future.”
—David Means, author of Hystopia
 
“Omar El Akkad’s urgent debut transmutes our society’s current dysfunction into a terrifying yet eerily recognizable future, where contemporary global and local conflicts have wreaked havoc on American soil. The threads between today and that future are his masterfully shaped characters. Their resilience, savagery, and humanity serve both as a portrait of who we are but also what we might very well become.”
—Elliot Ackerman, author of Dark at the Crossing

“Depicting a world uncomfortably close to the one we live in, American War is as captivating as it is deeply frightening.”
—Jarry Lee, Buzzfeed.com
 
“American War is terrifying in its prescient vision of the future.”
—Maris Kreizman, New York magazine

“Piercing . . . Written with precise care for the fictional truth . . . the book sounds a warning blast. American War is a disquieting novel of immense depth, and possibly a classic of our time.
—Al Woodworth, Omnivoracious.com
 
“Although set in America, [El Akkad’s] riveting story in many ways transcends politics, with details so impeccable and a plot so tightly woven that the events indeed feel factual.”
—Alice Cary, BookPage
 
“A dystopian vision . . . cannily imagined . . . But above all, El Akkad’s novel is an allegory about present-day military occupation, from drone strikes to suicide bombers to camps full of refugees.”
—Kirkus Reviews

"Stunning."
 —Michele Filgate, O, the Oprah Magazine

À propos de cette édition

• Éditeur: Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group
• Date d'édition: 2018
• ISBN 10: 1101973137
• ISBN 13: 9781101973134
• Reliure: Broché
• Nombre de pages: 432