Self-Discovery and the Limitations of Literature: On ‘Call Me Zebra’

Near the beginning of the novel , the narrator, an Iranian-American woman, arrives in Barcelona to retrace journeys she made as a refugee with her father. She panics at the prospect of revisiting her past, but calms down after “thinking of how literature’s interconnected network of sentences would chaperone me into a great silence…into the dark folds of the universe.” For the woman, also known as Zebra, literature is a solace from trauma, and a crutch during her loneliness. ’s novel about a difficult, funny, and troubled woman is at