Who Gets Believed?

October 1, 2022

Iranian-born novelist Nayeri (A Teaspoon of Earth and Sea), whose multi-award-honored The Ungrateful Refugee drew on her experience as an asylum seeker in United Arab Emirates, Italy, and the United States, continues in nonfiction vein with a new work prompted by the question, Why are honest asylum seekers often dismissed as liars? Extending her meditation to emergency rooms, office work, and family life, she probes the social constructions that shape our perception of what's true and what's not.

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December 1, 2022
The author of The Ungrateful Refugee, a Kirkus Prize finalist, probes the boundary between belief and disbelief. As she did in her previous book, Nayeri dances smoothly between memoir and the stories of others, drawing on her own formative years as an Iranian seeking--and being granted--asylum in the U.S. but moving beyond the experiences of refugees to explore other circumstances when belief and disbelief collide, often catastrophically: her childhood skepticism of the glossolalists in her mother's ecstatic church, the interrogation techniques that too often lead the innocent to falsely confess to crimes, her McKinsey training in the cultivation of trust in her clients, staged Soviet films of survivors of Nazi mass shootings, and her refusal to accept her partner's brother's mental illness. The author braids the story of a Sri Lankan torture survivor seeking asylum in the U.K. throughout the narrative as well as inevitable references to Kafka, their effectiveness unblunted by familiarity. Nayeri draws on both the work of organizations such as the Innocence Project and Great Britain's Freedom From Torture and the writings of thinkers including Blaise Pascal, Jacques Derrida, Susan Sontag, and, most extensively, Simone Weil. She ranges from her own uncertain faith to the cruelty of a culture that insists on "misfits and oddballs and quirky people" in works of fiction but strict conformity to a predetermined performance of credibility in the real world. Nayeri writes elegantly but a little claustrophobically. Readers spend a great deal of time with the author, her partner, their daughter, and the friends who sheltered through Covid-19 lockdown with them in a small town in Provence. She grapples with epistemology and with her partner's acute distress at his brother's illness, juxtaposing her private anguish with her examination of the suffering of others. An unflinching, compelling look at how "calcified hearts believe"--and disbelieve.

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January 9, 2023
Journalist and novelist Nayeri (The Ungrateful Refugee) argues in this wide-ranging and provocative study that believability is often a matter of “performance,” and that “disbelief is the baseline” in British and American immigration courts. Weaving stories of asylum seekers, prisoners, faith-seekers, and medical patients with her own experiences as a refugee, Nayeri examines intriguing issues around the question of truth. One of the strongest stories in the book is that of the brutal torture of a Sri Lankan political prisoner, his subsequent escape to the U.K., and his struggles to convince refugee agents that his scars were evidence of torture and that he should be granted asylum. The Home Office refused to believe him, Nayeri argues, because caseworkers are prone to doubt asylum seekers. Elsewhere, she describes the disbelief and dismissal of prisoners and the poor who come to emergency rooms for medical treatment, and recounts her experiences as a child refugee from Iran and evangelical Christian in Oklahoma, and reflects on her own unwillingness to accept that her brother-in-law struggled with mental illness. Though the discussions about the mistreatment of asylum seekers and refugees are insightful, abrupt changes of subject somewhat undermine the force of Nayeri’s arguments. The result is an incisive yet scattered investigation into the nature of doubt.

February 1, 2023

This genre-defying book investigates the basic foundations of a good story, demonstrating how people's lives are not only defined but also decided by the stories they tell. Beginning with the question of what makes something believable, former refugee Nayeri (The Ungrateful Refugee) leads readers through a series of narratives that reveal the fraught relationship between truth and believability, and she shows the premium people place on belief. This book combines deep research into the arcane workings of the asylum process with personal observations about religion, literature, cinema, and family life. Nayeri draws on interrogation videos and transcripts, thousands of pages of legal filings, numerous interviews, conversations, and her personal life to bring believability into view, but her greatest achievement is in filtering everything through her distinct voice, articulating her doubts, worries, compassion, anger, frustrations, and loves with bracing honesty. Few books are as erudite, comprehensive, and intensely personal all at once. VERDICT This is a riveting read that will be of interest to many, from those concerned with the plight of refugees and the biases built into many American institutions to anyone who loves unconventional memoirs and beautiful writing.--Willem Marx

Copyright 2023 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.