Adie’s got a nose for winners, ladies and gentlemen! Redeployment just won the National Book Award!
The National Book Award for fiction (as well as the other genres) will be announced this Wednesday, and the list of contenders is, as it is every year, a compilation of some of this year’s finest releases.
This year’s list is a fruit salad of books. Blockbuster Marilynne Robinson’s Lila. Overlooked until now, Emily St. John Mandel’s Station Eleven. Anthony Doer’s World War II novel, All the Light We Cannot See. Lebanese-American Rabih Alameddine’s quiet but unboring An Unnecessary Woman. And Phil Klay’s debut collection of short stories, Redeployment.
The real surprise here is Redeployment. As we head into another year of war in the Middle East, American soldiers once again returning to Iraq, this is a war we would like to see behind us. Give us stories of soldiers returning home. Of lives rebuilt from the wreckage of war. Of battlefields grown over. Of anything except IEDs and terrorist cells and soldiers crippled with PTSD. But Klay writes about the Second Gulf War in a way I have never read about it before.
Each of the 12 stories drowns the reader in a different facet of contemporary warfare–the chaplain sent to minister to marines, a state department worker establishing a water treatment facility for Sunni and Shiite, a veteran on the GI bill, a soldier in charge of collection remains.
Reading Redeployment, I was pleasantly surprised by the subtle power Phil Klay displays. Many of the stories walk the line between comedy and tragedy. His adherence to his characters is a force to be reckoned with.
Written by Adie
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