Signed
American War
Signed first edition, 2017
American War (2017) by Omar El Akkad is set in the United States between 2074 and 2095, during a Second Civil War triggered by the federal government's ban on fossil fuels and the Southern states' refusal to comply. The Mississippi Sea has swallowed Louisiana's coast. The Gulf states are a refugee zone. The novel follows Sarat Chestnut from childhood in a displaced persons camp through her radicalization into something the novel refuses to sentimentalize or excuse. El Akkad, a Canadian-Egyptian journalist who covered the wars in Afghanistan, the Arab Spring, and the military tribunals at Guantánamo Bay, structures the novel as a documented history, interspersing Sarat's story with excerpts from oral histories, federal syllabi, congressional hearings, and memoir.
Signed copy. Signed by the author on the title page.
Hardcover. First Edition, First Printing. Octavo, cloth-backed boards. New York: Knopf, 2017. ISBN: 9780451493583. #10686.
Fine in fine dust jacket.
Signed copy. Signed by the author on the title page.
Hardcover. First Edition, First Printing. Octavo, cloth-backed boards. New York: Knopf, 2017. ISBN: 9780451493583. #10686.
Fine in fine dust jacket.
Additional Details
American War opens in April 2075 on the banks of the Mississippi Sea, which is what the lower Mississippi has become as the coastal waters rise and swallow the delta parishes. The Chestnut family lives in a converted shipping container near the edge of the water, in territory that feels abandoned by everything north of it. Sarat, at six years old, is already being watched by the novel's framing narrator, who is recounting her story decades later with the full knowledge of how it ends. El Akkad establishes this retrospective structure early and uses it throughout, letting the reader know from the beginning that what follows is a life being reconstructed from documents and testimony after the fact.
The novel uses documentary style interludes throughout. Each chapter is preceded by an excerpt from a fictional historical source, a federal syllabus, a congressional hearing transcript, a soldier's memoir, an oral history volume, a war correspondent's dispatch. These documents describe the war from the outside, from above, from the institutional perspective of people who studied it or adjudicated it long after. They frame Sarat's story the way official history always frames the lives it touches, with holes, and with the priorities of the powerful intact. The contrast between the documentary record and the lived experience cuts to the heart of how wars are remembered.
Sarat's radicalization is the novel's central arc, and it is shaped by the events around her. There is a massacre at the displaced persons camp, then years of confinement at a detention facility in South Carolina where the interrogation methods are recognizable from accounts of Guantánamo Bay. There are the deaths of people she loved, and finally the attentions of Albert Gaines, a Southern intelligence operative who cultivates her talent for violence across years of patient manipulation. By the time Sarat becomes capable of the act the novel has been building toward, the reader understands exactly how she got there.
El Akkad has said in interviews that he wanted to write a novel that showed Americans what it looks like to be on the receiving end of the kind of war the United States has exported for decades. The Bouazizi Union, a powerful Middle Eastern federation that provides humanitarian aid to the conflict zone and occasionally intervenes diplomatically, is the United States seen from the outside. The refugee camps, the detention centers, the radicalization pipelines, the suicide bombings, the cycle of atrocity and reprisal, all are rendered in American geography and American dialects.
The novel ends with the consequences of Sarat's final act, traced through the framing narrator's reconstruction of what was lost. El Akkad resists the easier ending, the one where the personal scale of the tragedy resolves into something meaningful. Instead, the final pages are about the inability of meaning to accommodate what has happened.
The novel uses documentary style interludes throughout. Each chapter is preceded by an excerpt from a fictional historical source, a federal syllabus, a congressional hearing transcript, a soldier's memoir, an oral history volume, a war correspondent's dispatch. These documents describe the war from the outside, from above, from the institutional perspective of people who studied it or adjudicated it long after. They frame Sarat's story the way official history always frames the lives it touches, with holes, and with the priorities of the powerful intact. The contrast between the documentary record and the lived experience cuts to the heart of how wars are remembered.
Sarat's radicalization is the novel's central arc, and it is shaped by the events around her. There is a massacre at the displaced persons camp, then years of confinement at a detention facility in South Carolina where the interrogation methods are recognizable from accounts of Guantánamo Bay. There are the deaths of people she loved, and finally the attentions of Albert Gaines, a Southern intelligence operative who cultivates her talent for violence across years of patient manipulation. By the time Sarat becomes capable of the act the novel has been building toward, the reader understands exactly how she got there.
El Akkad has said in interviews that he wanted to write a novel that showed Americans what it looks like to be on the receiving end of the kind of war the United States has exported for decades. The Bouazizi Union, a powerful Middle Eastern federation that provides humanitarian aid to the conflict zone and occasionally intervenes diplomatically, is the United States seen from the outside. The refugee camps, the detention centers, the radicalization pipelines, the suicide bombings, the cycle of atrocity and reprisal, all are rendered in American geography and American dialects.
The novel ends with the consequences of Sarat's final act, traced through the framing narrator's reconstruction of what was lost. El Akkad resists the easier ending, the one where the personal scale of the tragedy resolves into something meaningful. Instead, the final pages are about the inability of meaning to accommodate what has happened.