Mesmerising migrants’ tales
AWOMAN is drowning. Her dress rises up around her waist, her legs dangle. She looks like a flower. She clings to a floating bookshelf, calling for help.
This is an image from Dave Eggers’s Zeitoun (2009), set in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina, but it smoothly encapsulates the ethos of just about every one of his books: We live, we suffer, but if we’re lucky we can find – or fashion – stories to bear us aloft.
The Monk of Mokha is the third in his series of real-life accounts of immigrants to America caught in the jaws of history. What Is the What (2006) followed one of Sudan’s Lost Boys, the thousands of children who fled villages decimated by civil war and wandered, for years, through lioninfested war zones.
In Zeitoun, a Syrian-american survived Hurricane Katrina only to be rounded up as a suspected member of al-qaeda. Each book is a tale of a latter-day Job and a reflection on the act of storytelling itself, none more so than this latest, in which a reckless young man keeps himself alive like Scheherazade – his ability to spin stories ensures his survival.
Mokhtar Alkhanshali is a “lobby ambassador” (San Francisco for “doorman”) at a posh apartment building, where he spends his days waving in chandelier repairmen and pet nutritionists. The son of Yemeni immigrants, he grew up street smart and aimless in the seedy Tenderloin district, an inveterate loafer, sponger, bungler and charmer. An ideal character, in short, whose lofty ambitions and indifference to detail and danger give this story more zigs and zags than Lombard Street.
Life snapped into focus for Alkhanshali when he learnt that coffee was originally cultivated in Yemen, some 500 years ago. Today, however, Yemeni coffee is regarded as some of the worst in the world. It became Alkhanshali’s obsession to restore its honour – never mind that he was broke, knew nothing about coffee and, frankly, didn’t much care for the taste. Never mind Yemen’s seething civil war.
Before you can say Horatio Alger, Alkhanshali was assessing coffee crops in Yemen with seasoned disdain and wearing, as you do, a garland of grenades that signalled his “willingness to take any argument to its logical conclusion”. His mission culminated in a most harrowing return journey – but time and time again, he talked himself out of trouble; he has a preternatural gift for persuading others to join his cause.
Of late, Eggers the novelist has succumbed to sermonising. He likes an easy target, and his recent fiction goes after predictable boogeymen: social media’s encroachment on privacy (The Circle, 2013), say, or addiction (Heroes of the Frontier, 2016).
It’s narrative non-fiction that is his natural home. Telling other people’s stories seems to focus him. The sentences take on an Orwellian clarity – they’re lean and clean, cleansed of the tics, doodles and strenuous selfconsciousness of his early work, and of the dour didacticism of the new novels. In The Monk of Mokha, he moves lightly between story and analysis, and between brisk histories of Yemeni immigration to America; gentrifying San Francisco; coffee cultivation; and the saints and thieves who dispersed the beans around the world.
You can dispatch the book in one sitting. I did, on a snowy Sunday afternoon. It left me warmed, but also wired, and a little twitchy. What is it about