Lorraine AdamsBesprekingen

One of the few books that I could not finish. I did not care about the characters.

A complex story of refugees and illegals from Algeria. It tells gracesfully slowly and inexorably how humans interpret, misinterpret ambiguities, blurred existences.

I very much enjoyed Adams' previous novel, Harbor, a story of Algerians who stowaway on ship to the US and what becomes of them. Her latest novel brings us the story behind what could be headlines on any given day.

A pilot ejects from her F16 Viper just before it crashes in the Potomac River at night, the lights of the Watergate Hotel twinkling in the distance. The pilot is Captain Mary "Extra" Goodwin and it is her story that is the anchor line in this complex literary thriller.

The "room" of the book's title is the newsroom of a prominent D.C. newspaper, always a flurry of activity, but now scrambling to sort fact from rumor about the crash, and as fast as they can. We see how the newsroom works in fascinating detail.

The "chair" of the book's title is Will Holmes, former soldier and spook now running a secretive agency—the one responsible for the crash—which was testing a remote way to control a plane without the pilot knowing it, a way to stop suicide pilots—without Capt. Goodwin's knowledge.

The narrative moves In alternating segments between several plotlines, following numerous characters (some more prominent than others), in an elaborate, sometimes dizzying dance from D.C. to Iran and Afghanistan, as the author brings it all her pieces together. Her characters are wonderfully done, credible and fascinating each in their own way. I'm not sure I expected to be so totally mesmerized by this book, but the author carries us along, voyeurs to things usually unseen, and witnesses to the lives affected. It's hard to turn away. And yet, there were places where I got a bit lost, and there is something I can't quite identify that keeps me short of raving about the book (but please, don't let that stop you from reading it).

A complex story of refugees and illegals from Algeria. It tells gracesfully slowly and inexorably how humans interpret, misinterpret ambiguities, blurred existences.

A military pilot loses control over the Potomac and crash lands on Theodore Roosevelt Island. But was it an accident? An editor at the big Washington daily is curious and a Metro reporter eventually investigates. Meanwhile, a spooky type is feeling a little bad because the pilot is a woman and all he seems to have wanted to do was test his ability to remotely force a plane out of the sky, in case a terrorist gets a hold of it. Scene switches to Iran, where a nuclear engineer talks to his luggage, runs to a safe place, runs back, is possibly blown up in his hotel room. Back to the pilot, now out of Walter Reed and in Afghanistan, flying a nasty bomb drop and then going sledding. Tragedy happens. Back at the Post, erp, whatever it was named, a Woodward figure and a maybe Sally Quinn figure and the intrepid Metro night editor (night editors rock!) futz around, while the reporter sort of figures out the pilot crash story with the help of an underage prostitute. She also pinpoints the Important Facts buried in a Senate Intelligence Committee report that the Woodward guy may have had but was saving for his own book (okay that part rings true) and the sort-of Sally person had but was too wrapped up in her own drama to deal with it in a timely fashion. No matter. With the truth staring them in the collective eyeball, the AMEs still aren't buying the reporter's story, for vague reasons having nothing obvious to do with dead-trees and digital platforms.

Most of this isn't believable (really, would a Metro reporter drive out to NoVa and not first get her road directions straight?), although the adventures of Mary the Downed Pilot did keep me reading, even past the chapter with the nuke engineer, in which the fact that this is a Literary Novel was jammed down the reader's esophagus. ("During their one meeting...on a blasting cold sun of a morning, nothing moved Will's digit of a face." And, "Hoseyn couldn't summon his own phone number to mind. It felt as if he had a dowel in his cortex." And, "There was a knock at the door. It was a columnar noise.")

Ex-Postie Lorraine Adams might be trying to skewer people and things that deserve skewering, but to paraphrase a line from her effort: "[She] could have parachuted into the field of potatoes when it was in the onions where [she'd] been supposed to land."

Densely written, pretty good book about the immigrant experience in USA. Tells the story of a group of Algerian refugees mistaken for terrorists.

Lorraine Adams won a Pulitzer prize as an investigative journalist for the Washington Post some seven years before she stumbled upon the newspaper story that would eventually inspire her 2004 debut novel. That novel, "Harbor," would also prove to be a prize winner by being named “Book of the Year” by both the Washington Post and Entertainment Weekly and being awarded with the Los Angeles Times 2004 book prize for first fiction.

Although most of its action takes place in Boston, Harbor is really a story about the breakdown of society in modern Algeria, a country that for too many years suffered the slaughter of its population at the hands of several Muslim extremists groups, the army charged with protecting the population, and the corrupt government that, at times, seemed to welcome the carnage. It is said that over 100,000 people died in those few years, most of them butchered, and many thousands of them decapitated for the purpose of terrorizing those who might fight back.

Aziz Arkoun, and hundreds more like him who could not find work that would allow them to marry and move from the home of their parents, would make their way illegally to the United States, willing to risk their lives and leave everything they knew behind in hope of a better life. After 52 days as a stowaway on a tanker, Aziz finds himself in a near frozen Boston harbor, jumps overboard, and barely survives his swim to shore. He speaks not a word of English, has no money, and no plan other than to contact another Algerian, the one person that might help him.

In what seems to him a miracle, Aziz overhears two people on the street speaking Arabic and, after throwing himself at their mercy, he is taken into the home of one of the men until he is well enough to contact his “cousin” who lives just a few miles away. Aziz finds himself living in a cramped apartment with other Algerian illegals, a little support group to which he would remain attached for several years while he and the others struggled to learn English and find work, no matter what it might pay.

Unfortunately for Aziz and his friends, his “cousin” is not one to work for anything as low as minimum wage and he makes his own living by smuggling everything from drugs, to designer clothes, to what the FBI believes might be explosive chemicals. The FBI, in its effort to prove that the Algerians are a threat to the country (a full year prior to 9-11), links bits and pieces of evidence together into what becomes a wider and wider net that threatens to haul in the innocent along with anyone that might be guilty.

Adams does not avoid the horrific truth of what was happening in Algeria in the early nineties and, in fact, describes one murder in such brutal detail that readers will be shocked, if not offended, by what they read. However, that incident forms the very core of "Harbor", and without it, the book would not be nearly so strong or its message so true. As one who was evacuated from Algiers just as everything there was falling apart, I strongly commend Lorraine Adams for telling Algeria’s story in such frank and believable terms despite the fact that I had dreams of that particular killing for two nights running. Let no one doubt that, in "Harbor,"Adams has captured the utter brutality of what Algeria suffered at the hands of its own.

Rated at: 4.5½

The story centers on the activities of several Algerian immigrants and their difficulties. Good demonstration of how terrorism investigations can go astray with devastating consequences. Well written and timely.½

The book focuses on an illegal immigrant from Algeria who becomes a terrorism suspect. The story takes place prior to 9/11 but is written post-9/11. I wasn't that impressed with it. At times it rambles and unless you have a good understanding of Algerian politics/history, it is hard to follow. I'm not sure if the author was trying to invoke sympathy for illegal immigrants, potential terrorists or Arab people in general. Mostly the characters seemed pretty stereotypical to me.