This Is Not Civilization: A Novel - Hardcover

Rosenberg, Robert

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0618386017 ISBN 13: 9780618386017

Publisher: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2004

Synopsis

Jeff Hartig, an American Peace Corps volunteer, and Anarbek Tashtanaliev, the owner of a Soviet cheese factory, are just a few of the disaffected characters who end up in Turkey on the eve of the 1999 earthquake, hoping to find something they cannot get at home. A first novel.

About this title

About the Author

Robert Rosenberg recently finished his M.F.A. at the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, where he held Maytag and Teaching-Writing fellowships. Previously he served as a Peace Corps volunteer in newly independent Kyrgyzstan. He lived there for two years, and afterward the Peace Corps awarded him a fellowship to teach on the White Mountain Apache Reservation in Arizona while he completed his master’s in education. He lived in Cibecue, a small Apache village, and as one of the four original teachers he helped establish the village’s first high school. He also founded and edited a community magazine devoted to preserving the culture of the White Mountain Apache tribe. In 1999 he took a teaching job in Istanbul, arriving there five days before the August 17 earthquake.

From the Inside Flap

Gripping...exotic and intimate. Every line rings with authenticity, every moment breathes with love and life and heartache. A beautiful, resonant book. - Brady Udall, author of The Miracle Life of Edgar Mint

This novel should do for us what The Quiet American did for an earlier generation -- put into perspective Americans' well-meaning but arrogant involvement in the affairs of very different cultures. Beware: you're likely to stay up all night to finish it. --Phyllis Rose, author of Parallel Lives

For the past twenty years, returned Peace Corps volunteers--Paul Theroux, Norman Rush, Maria Thomas, Richard Wiley et al--have won just about every major literary award in the country, and Robert Rosenberg seems destined to be a member of this distinguished group of writers. This Is Not Civilization is a wonderful first novel, full of the marvelous compressions and juxtapositions and clashes that have indeed made the world a very small place. --Bob Shacochis, winner of the National Book Award

This Is Not Civilization is a remarkable novel that illuminates the most important struggle of our times: to find a self and to find kindredness in a world where our shared humanity is often lost to the claims of our superficial differences. Robert Rosenberg has written not only a wonderfully readable work of fiction but also an important one. --Robert Olen Butler, winner of the Pulitzer Prize

Beautiful...Rosenberg should be thanked for his insights into Middle Eastern culture at a time when understanding of that troubled region is essential. --James Alan McPherson, winner of the Pulitzer Prize

So how does first novelist Rosenberg manage to pull it off so beautifully?... A wonderful work; highly recommended. -- Library Journal, (starred review)

Reviews

Ah, the happy days of the 1990s, when Americans could travel abroad fearing only natural disasters and imperfect plumbing. This rollicking first novel brings readers to some unusual locales—post-Soviet Kyrgyzstan, an Apache reservation, earthquake-shattered Istanbul—to tell the story of Jeff Hartig, a young man who travels the world but can’t leave behind his own shortcomings. After an unhappy time running a teen center in the Apache town of Red Cliff, Ariz., recent college graduate Jeff hitches up with the Peace Corps, landing at an even more remote destination—the Kyrgyz village of Kyzyl Adyr-Kirovka, deep in the steppes of Central Asia. The village’s one asset is a defunct cheese factory funded by government subsidies, run by the ebullient, generous Anarbek Tashtanaliev, who takes it upon himself to help Jeff experience the overwhelming wonders of Kyrgyz hospitality. Anarbek also has a beautiful, English-speaking daughter named Nazira, who understands more clearly than her fellow villagers how little one American visitor can accomplish for them. Ashamed of his own ineffectualness, Jeff flees Kyrgyzstan, leaving behind one lasting impression—a pregnant Nazira. He next alights in Istanbul, where he settles once again into expatriate life, until Anarbek, Nazira and his young Apache friend Adam appear, asking Jeff to make good on all his promises of assistance. Then the 1999 earthquake hits, in a harrowing sequence that envelops the entire mismatched group and plunges Istanbul straight back into the uncivilized world. Rosenberg’s ability to illustrate these oddball settings—based on his own time in the Peace Corps and elsewhere—is pitch perfect, a vibrant mix of the serious and the absurd. With Jeff, he puts a brilliant new spin on a compelling type: the Well-Meaning American.
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The lives of four people from vastly different backgrounds cross in an antic tale, which starts in Arizona and ends in Istanbul. Jeff, the gormless but likable linchpin of the story, travels from a disastrous job on a Native American reservation in the U.S. to a fruitless spell as a Peace Corps volunteer teaching English to factory workers in post-Soviet Kyrgyzstan. In his travels, Jeff forges connections with an Apache youth and a Kirgiz family. Major characters are strongly depicted, although Jeff's lack of motivation remains a mystery. The basic bleakness of a book set in regions of poverty and hardship is leavened with humor rooted in cultural differences and the misunderstandings that arise from them. Plot and characterization build through the first three sections--set in Arizona and Kyrgyzstan--but fall apart in the last section, set in Istanbul during the destruction of the 1999 earthquake. Despite the overly melodramatic and pat ending, Rosenberg's modern picaresque tour is a well-written, engaging, and promising debut. Ellen Loughran
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved

Edition details

• Publisher: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt
• Publication date: 2004
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0618386017
• ISBN 13: 9780618386017
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 293