Product Description

A New York Times and Washington Post Notable Book
Entertainment Weekly's #1 Fiction Book of the Year

A tremendously acclaimed and exquisitely realized novel of literary suspense, Harbor recounts the adventures of Aziz Arkoun who, at twenty-four, makes his way to America via the hold of an Algerian tanker and the icy waters of Boston harbor. Aziz soon finds himself a community of fellow Algerians, but their means of survival in this strange land begins to remind him of the dangerous world he was desperate to escape. As the story of Aziz and his friends unfolds, moving from East Boston and Brooklyn to Montreal and a North African army camp, Harbor takes us inside the ambiguities of these men's past and present lives. When Aziz discovers that he and his circle are most likely under surveillance, all assumptions, his and ours, dissolve in urgent, mesmerizing complexity.
 

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #443640 in Books
• Published on: 2005-09-13
• Released on: 2005-09-13
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Paperback
• 304 pages

Amazon.com
Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Lorraine Adams has crafted a debut novel worthy of any seasoned novelist's pen. Harbor is as current as the headlines, chronicling the desperate, confused, marginal lives of a group of Arab Muslims in Boston, Montreal, and Brooklyn. Aziz Arkoun arrives in Boston Harbor after 52 days as a stowaway in the hold of a tanker. He swims to shore through icy waters, arriving ill and disoriented. His experience is comparable to that of the Guatemalan immigrants in "El Norte": what he finds when he arrives is only slightly better than what he left, but at least he is not in immediate danger of being killed. Adams does a masterful job of rendering Aziz's confusion as he confronts a strange language in an almost unknowable world, tries to suss out what illegal goings-on his cousin is up to, sleeps in a chair a few hours a night, and works in a low-paying job for a brutish boss.

Threaded through the ongoing narrative is the backstory of what Aziz escaped: forced military service in the Algerian army, a chance role as a double agent which almost gets him killed and causes him to desert, and the ordinary, everyday horror of a bloody ground war. After deserting the army, he goes home, only to have his double agency discovered, which puts him on the run again, this time to Boston Harbor. At 24, he is a veteran in every sense of the word. Somehow, he retains an insouciance and innocence through it all. Not so his roommates.

Adams raises the question: "Who is a terrorist?" What makes this book irresistible is that there is no easy answer. Is it the one reading ancient Persian poems or the Qu'uran, or the one stealing Batman toys to resell at a profit? What we are stuck with is what an FBI agent says: "...we don't have to know them. We can't, ever. We can just piece together something here with something there and draw logical conclusions. It's flawed, of course it's flawed. But it's better than the alternative." --ValerieRyan

From Publishers Weekly
The uncertain lives of illegal Algerian immigrants are the subject of this compelling, topical debut novel. Adams, a Pulitzer Prize–winning journalist, brings a reporter's eye for detail to the story, which begins with Aziz Arkoun's arrival in Boston Harbor. After 52 days as a stowaway in a tanker's hold—his third attempt to escape his country—Aziz swims to shore. Adams reveals and conceals just enough to keep readers almost as disoriented as Aziz, who, with no English and ruined health, survives almost by chance. But Aziz has fled Algeria, where he was an accidental double agent for Islamist militants, for another kind of brutish existence: intermittent minimum-wage employment, shady compatriots and FBI scrutiny. Straying from his modus operandi of inconspicuous survival, he and his friend Ghazi investigate the mysterious storage unit of their roommate Rafik. Is Rafik moving stolen designer clothes, hash or explosive chemicals? Their fingerprints implicate them in Rafik's racket; Aziz flees to Brooklyn, and Ghazi runs to Montreal, where he's seduced by a life of crime and perhaps by the "Allah-talk" of a childhood acquaintance who aspires to be a node in an international terrorist network. Aziz is no "prayer-boy," but for the FBI there are too few degrees of separation between him and a terrorist cell. Adams's lucid, psychologically complicated page-turner captures the ambiguities of and raises important questions about the domestic war on terror.
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

From The New Yorker
This début novel by a Pulitzer-winning journalist tells the story of Aziz Arkoun, a twenty-four-year-old Arab Muslim from Algeria who enters America illegally by hiding for fifty-two days in the hold of a tanker and swimming into Boston Harbor. Aziz falls in with a group of young Algerians in East Boston, including Rafik, a childhood friend who is now a petty criminal. Hopes for prosperity and safety are dashed: Aziz takes low-paying jobs, is beset by chaotic living arrangements, and, after stumbling across some suspicious secret dealings of Rafik's, gets caught up in the F.B.I. investigation of an international terrorist cell. Though the premise of the novel may seem too topical for its own good, Adams displays a gift for detail and character that takes us fully inside the complex systems of survival, kinship, and religious ideology which form Aziz's world.
Copyright © 2005 The New Yorker

Customer Reviews

Terrible writing style
I hated the writing style. The train of thought frequently de-rails. You sometimes don't know you're reading a reverie/inner-thought/flashback until later. By then you're already confused. You ask yourself Did that JUST happen, or was that a flashback/reverie/inner-thought? I frequently had to read paragraphs twice.

Good premise, but not my cup of tea
In this tale of a young Algerian man who stows away on a ship and tries to make a life in America, Ms Adams draws a rich portrait of the feelings of dissociation the main character, Aziz, must have felt: trying to find a friend and fellow countryman; meeting new friends (mostly also Algerian); trying to make a living; finding out what shady business some of his friends are into. Slowly we learn the reason Aziz has fled Algeria (as if just being there wasn't reason enough): to survive, he impersonated another and joined a band of men who went about slaughtering people.

This is also a tale of prejudice and misinformation. An FBI investigation into a terrorist cell makes many assumptions, not many of them correct. The Algerians don't always have the most charitable opinions about Americans, either.

The result is a sad and somewhat powerful tale of trying to fit in but not wanting to, of being unwanted in the land you had hoped would save you, of surviving against all odds.

But I found it hard to be sympathetic to the characters. I had little patience for their misogyny and for their insularity. Although most of them were sad characters, they also seemed shady, each in his (or her) own way. The FBI agents seemed thrown in just to lecture us and to show us how incompetent they were. I also found it hard to follow the story, but maybe this was intentional, as Aziz was so lost in America at first; and the FBI agents, later, seemed to have trouble finding the hands in front of their faces.

Yet small passages from the book opened my eyes to how easy it can be to come to wrong conclusions, especially when suspicion and fear come into play; and how hard it is to be a stranger in a strange land -- how easy it is to disappear within yourself and your small circle, with no one paying you any mind except to think you're up to no good. This will probably be one of those books that will grow on me now that I've finished it, but I don't think it'll go down as an all-time favorite.

Overall Good Book!
Harbor by Lorraine Adams is a very good book. Harbor is set during the Pre 9-11 Days. The story begins with a man named Aziz Arkoun jumping off from a tanker into the Boston Harbor and then swimming to shore. He is an illegal immigrant From Algeria who is a stowaway. He doesn't speak English, He isn't a legal citizen, and on top of that he is bruised and scarred from staying in the Tanker. When he finally gets to shore, he is met with his cousin Rafik. His cousin rescues him and brings him to the apartment that he lives in. There in the apartment building his cousin lives in, he meets friends: Kamal, Mourad Aziz's brother who is a legal immigrant, Ghazi, and the only American Heather. All of them participate in some illegal activities. The FBI is informed about all of the illegal things that they are doing and they try to arrest Ghazi and he manages to escape. He then informs his friends and they all split up. Aziz then moves to New York. To find out the rest of this interesting storyline you must read the book yourself! In my opinion this is a must read book if you are looking for a good read and for a provocative book. This book is highly recommended to anyone.