Book of the week: Strength in What Remains: A Journey of Remembrance and Forgiveness by Tracy Kidder

(Random House, 277 pages, $26)

The hospital was unusually quiet on the day the killings began. Deo, a 22-year-old intern, was making his morning rounds in the rural Burundi facility when he learned that the country’s president, a Hutu, had been assassinated, and that his kinsmen were now taking their revenge. Minutes later, there was shattering glass and gunshots, followed by the smell of burning flesh. Deo cowered under a bed as the assailants murdered every Tutsi they could find. Luckily spared, he fled on a nightmarish six-month journey. A classmate’s father put him on a plane for New York, where he slept his first night in a squalid room reeking of sewage. It would be months before he realized that he invariably mispronounced the valuable word “hi” as “hee.”

Tracy Kidder “may have just written his finest work,” said Ron Suskind in The New York Times. The Pulitzer Prize–winning author of 1981’s The Soul of a New Machine has allowed Deo to be a fully human protagonist instead of a saint, so it’s all the more powerful to see both the atrocities of Burundi’s civil war and the realities of modern America through his eyes. “Kidder’s rendering of what Deo endured just before he boarded that plane for New York is one of the most powerful passages of modern nonfiction.” If anything, Kidder is “too fine a writer,” said Dwight Garner, also in the Times. He mentions dogs carrying human heads in their mouths, but never dwells long on such horrors. Given the material he’s working with, his “clear, perfectly buffed, shyly self-satisfied sentences can be curiously distancing.”

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For all Kidder’s skill, he also occasionally makes Deo seem less an individual than a symbol, said William Easterly in The Wall Street Journal. Africa isn’t as violent and destitute as Deo’s experiences would suggest. So his harrowing story, though ultimately uplifting, ends up affirming rather than challenging the reader’s worldview. Deo, against all odds, eventually returns to his native Burundi village to launch a free medical clinic, said Johann Hari in Slate.com. But it’s not clear that readers are expected to see this moment as purely redemptive. Admirable as his choice is, Kidder subtly hints that Deo has deceived himself into believing that his genocidal countrymen are worthy of forgiveness.