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book cover of 

I, Wabenzi 

A Souvenir 

by

Rafi Zabor

I, Wabenzi: A Souvenir

(2005)
A non fiction book by

Rafi Zabor



 

Some time ago Rafi Zabor sat down to write a brief narrative of the year 1986. That was the year he set out across two continents in a used Mercedes--"Wabenzi" is the Swahili word for a member of the Mercedes-owning class--to buy a grave stone for his friend Mahmoud Rauf and to outrun the shadow of his own parents' recent death.

But like a boat against the current, the writer was drawn back into the past: his father's escape from the Nazis, Rafi's own Brooklyn boyhood surrounded by the fractious, Zabors and Zaborovskys, and the anguished--sometimes farcical--spiritual journey that led Zabor from Brooklyn to Turkey by way of Coltrane, the thirteenth-century mystic Muhyiddin Ibn 'Arabi, the McGovern campaign, Gurdjieff, a shoe salesman named Gogol, and the cataclysmic months Zabor spent studying (and whirling) amid a band of Sufis in rural England. The result--the first of a projected four volumes--is one of the most original, capacious, and vivid narratives of the last few decades, a real-life Bildungsroman dealing with an expanded range of human experience, from matters of life and death to a piece of what lies beyond them.

Straight from the unchartered territory between Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance and Tristram Shandy, I, Wabenzi lifts a corner of the known world as if it were the edge of a curtain, and begins to show a reality new to our literature gleaming on the other side.
 
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Hardback Editions

October 2005 : Hardback
Cover of ISBN: 0865475830Title: I, Wabenzi: A Souvenir (Aporia)
Author(s): Rafi Zabor
ISBN: 0-86547-583-0 / 978-0-86547-583-0 (USA edition)
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Availability: Amazon   Amazon UK   Amazon CA   
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Paperback Editions

January 2007 : Paperback
Cover of ISBN: 1846270278Title: I, Wabenzi: A Souvenir
Author(s): Rafi Zabor
ISBN: 1-84627-027-8 / 9781846270277 (UK edition)
Publisher: Portobello Books Ltd
Availability: Amazon   Amazon UK   
More details...

April 2006 : Paperback
Cover of ISBN: 184627026XTitle: I, Wabenzi: A Souvenir
Author(s): Rafi Zabor
ISBN: 1-84627-026-X / 9781846270260 (UK edition)
Publisher: Portobello Books Ltd
Availability: Amazon   Amazon UK   
More details...

2005 : Paperback
Cover of ISBN: B000HZ5152Title: I, Wabenzi
Author(s): Rafi Zabor
Publisher: Farrar, Straus & Giroux
Availability: Amazon   
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