I, Wabenzi

Liesl Schillinger

In I, Wabenzi, the first installment in a projected four-volume memoir, Rafi Zabor proves himself a master of this motif, presenting a freak show of decayed male specimens: from a mystic named Bulent ("a pear-shaped hillock of flesh, his neck long since vanished in a bellying gullet of underflap") to a drink-ravaged hipster named Tash (with "narrow shoulders, ribs showing under the skin of the back, the sagbelly sack shown in quarter-profile") to his Uncle Avram (whose "peasant face was usually pale and looked somehow dusted lightly with fine flour, like a bialy"). But beneath these caricatures lies a haunting tenderness, a spontaneous affection for what seems outwardly unlovable.
— The New York Times

KleinzahlerAugust

The most remarkable quality in Rafi Zabor's idiosyncratic memoir I, Wabenzi is his voice. It's propulsive, expansive and flexible enough to incorporate broad statements and telling details, often in the same sentence. The first-person voices of Saul Bellow's Augie March and Jack Kerouac's Sal Paradise come to mind. Zabor commands the swaggering, wisecracking street smarts of the former and the "spontaneous bop prosody" of the latter. Throw in a dash of Laurence Sterne and Lord Buckley, the 1950s hipster, and you're just about in the neighborhood.
— The Washington Post

Publishers Weekly

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. Agent, Kathleen Anderson. (Oct.) Copyright 2005 Reed Business Information.

Library Journal

Zabor has seen lots of buzz building about his quirky little memoir, which manages to stuff in his father's escape from the Nazis, his travels to Turkey, his passion for John Coltrane and 13th-century mystic Muhyiddin Ibn 'Arabi, and the year he spent whirling with Sufis. Ostensibly, though, it's the story of how he set out in a battered Mercedes-Wabenzi is Swahili for the Mercedes-owning class-to buy his friend a tombstone. Copyright 2005 Reed Business Information.

Kirkus Reviews

A rambling, disjointed, sometimes amusing memoir about a car trip to Turkey and Israel that will apparently not conclude (or even truly commence) until the second volume of this planned four-volume work appears. Zabor's bizarre, well-received 1997 novel, The Bear Comes Home, paves the way for this dilatory tale. The idea for this book's title came to Zabor after someone told him that "Africans" call people who drive Mercedeses "Wabenzi," and since he plans to buy one, he concludes that he's a member of that august clan. Early on, he tells of the disturbing deaths of his parents, narratives that he interrupts with flashbacks to his youth and with truly magical stories about his powerful Polish uncle, whose prodigious strength dazzles the author (the elderly man once defeated, with ease, a young and ripped arm-wrestling champ). Zabor makes some shocking discoveries, most notably that his mother thought she had aborted him. He also explores some of his failures, including the time, as a young man, that he arranged for a girlfriend's abortion; the fetus was five months old. The author-slowly, slowly-leaves New York and heads to England, where he catches up with friends he's known since the 1970s. He interweaves these recent English escapades with memories from 30 years earlier, including the long, dull closing portion (well over 100 pages) that relates his experiences at a spiritual retreat. These pages sometimes read like an unintentional self-parody. Zabor's language vacillates between the effusive (some sentences exceed 200 words in length) and the minimalist, the sublime and the banal. A frenetic example of pinball prose that will frustrate many.