Zeitoun by Dave Eggers
Dave Eggers's account of one man's ordeal at the hands of US military officials in the wake of hurricane Katrina is a grim indictment of the Bush regime
Valerie Martin , The Observer, Sunday 21 March 2010

  Zeitoun
by Dave Eggers
352pp, Hamish Hamilton,£17.99

On 19 September 2005, Kathy Zeitoun answered the phone at her friend Yuko's house in Phoenix, Arizona. The caller identified himself as an official in the Department of Homeland Security. He informed her that her husband, Abdulrahman Zeitoun, was a prisoner at the Elayn Hunt Correctional Centre in St Gabriel, Louisiana.
"He's fine, ma'am. We have no more interest in him."
"You have no interest in him? Is that good or bad?"
"That's good."

Dave Eggers's latest book, Zeitoun, patiently unravels the harrowing tale of how Kathy Zeitoun, a Louisiana native who grew up in a southern Baptist family in Baton Rouge, came to be on the other end of that phone call in Phoenix, where she learned that her husband, who had been missing for two weeks, was still alive, and not, as she'd feared, murdered or drowned in the floodwaters still inundating the city of New Orleans. She had last seen him on 27 August, when she and their four children evacuated the city before the approaching hurricane. Zeitoun insisted on staying behind to look after their various properties. As the children waved to their father, Kathy experienced a sense of déjà vu.

A dozen times they had lived this moment, as Kathy and his children drove off in search of sanctuary or rest, leaving Zeitoun to watch over his house and the houses of his neighbours and clients all over the city. He had keys to dozens of other houses; everyone trusted him with their homes and everything in them.
The hurricane, as everyone knows, was Katrina, and it battered the city with the expected wind and rain, while Zeitoun and many thousands of his fellow citizens – some jammed into the comfortless shelter of the Superdome, some in their own beds – stayed awake and listened. His house sustained minor leaks he contained in buckets. Electrical power went out. The next day passed quietly, as did another night. On 30 August, Zeitoun woke to the sound of running water, which he first took to be a broken pipe.

His ordeal had begun.
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