“A patchwork story is the shame of a refugee,” Daniel Nayeri writes in Everything Sad Is Untrue. Nayeri’s patchwork story forms a stunning quilt, each piece lovingly stitched together to create a saga that deserves to be savored.
Everything Sad Is Untrue is the mostly true story of Khosrou, who becomes Daniel, and the two lives he has lived in just 11 years. First, there’s his life back in Iran, where his family was wealthy, where he went hunting for leopards and where his parents’ veins were filled with the blood of divinity. Then there’s his life now, in Oklahoma, where he has to learn to survive the bus ride home, where his mother has to learn to survive her new husband and where he realizes his memories of his first life are slipping away.
In the voice of his younger self, Nayeri casts himself as Scheherazade, with readers as his king; we hold his life in our hands. Should we believe his tales? His classmates in Oklahoma don’t. No one believes that the smelly kid who is too poor to pay for lunch in the cafeteria once lived in a beautiful house and dined with the prince of Abu Dhabi. Even Nayeri admits his memory is shaky. Was that really the prince of Abu Dhabi? It’s hard to know when you’re a kid who’s just escaped a religious death squad by fleeing to a foreign country.
The stakes here are life and death, not only for young Daniel and his family during their journey but also for Nayeri the storyteller, who stands before us in “the parlors of our minds,” spinning tale after tale. To stop reading is to condemn him to a death of indifference. But Nayeri is a gifted writer whose tales of family, injustice, tragedy, faith, history and poop (yes, poop) combine to create such an all-consuming experience that reacting with indifference is simply not possible.
A deeply personal book that makes a compelling case for empathy and hope, Everything Sad Is Untrue is one of the most extraordinary books of the year.
ALSO IN BOOKPAGE: Author Daniel Nayeri and publisher/editor Arthur A. Levine go behind the scenes of Everything Sad Is Untrue.
