Seven months after the worst natural disaster in U.S. history, New Orleans has once again been scattered across the country but not on wind, storm surge, or commandeered bus. A torrent of books has emerged to take on the horror of Hurricane Katrina and her wake of devastation. Not only do they chronicle the wrecking of homes and inimitable relationships with a place and irreplaceable way of life by “that whore Katrina,” as certain locals and t-shirts say, but, more importantly, they rescue New Orleans from invisibility.

New Orleans exists beyond the pale much like Isaura in Italo Calvino’s Invisible Cities. The city of the thousand wells “is said to rise over a deep, subterranean lake… Its green border repeats the dark outline of the buried lake; an invisible landscape conditions the visible one; everything that moves in the sunlight is driven by the lapping waves enclosed beneath the rock’s calcareous sky.”

Subterranean and unseen worlds arranging visible reality is a given in New Orleans beyond watery geography and weather. Poverty, political corruption, crime, history, and the dead alternately reveal and conceal the city behind the city in a lurid, ever fascinating peepshow. On the outside looking in, New Orleans is shrouded in tourist boosterism, hearsay, and its own naturally occurring mystery. For the virgin, it is simply impossible to access its layers without immersion in them, no safety device provided.

New Orleans, Mon Amour; Do You Know What It Means to Miss New Orleans?; 1 dead in attic; and the latest New Orleans Review (volume 31, number 2), among other recent publications, raise the curtain on all of these strains and seeks to fill in the spaces where the city has disappeared.

“My nature is the city. Not any city: only those cities, like New Orleans, which have become nature,” writes Andrei Codrescu in New Orleans, Mon Amour: Twenty Years of Writings from the City. The wilderness and the urban entered into an intimate conspiracy in the Big Easy long ago, as inveterate as that of the sacred and profane, and Codrescu has an informal knack for showing the carpe diem effects of this passive-aggressive marriage on its children, whether homegrown or adopted.

“It’s an environment for a specific life-form,” he continues in the book’s excerpt from Hail Babylon: In Search of the American City at the End of the Millennium, “a dream, lazy, sentimental, musical one, prey to hallucinations (not visions), tolerant, indolent, and gifted at storytelling… We lie incongruously in the way of thrifty, Puritan America whose concerns, including environmental ones, are driven by the logic of economics and planning. We, and our ways, are marked for elimination; there is no room in an efficient future for what we embody.”

Portentous passages like this one throughout 60-plus vignettes, articles, and treatise-like rants sink in your stomach like rocks. After observing latter-day manifestations of French and Caribbean culture and declaring their improbable continuation, many of Codrescu’s thoughts, even idle ones, have turned into weirdly dated, necessary testimonies. Regardless of the fact that Katrina will be a dividing line in the eccentric, tragic canon of Louisiana literature, as clear as the black watermark drawn haphazardly under roof eaves and along buildings, the question that begs answering is “How fundamentally changed is the city in spirit?”

Simultaneously writing to bear witness and to recover is a delicate and brutal but essential endeavor. “These fragments I shore against my ruin,” wrote T. S. Eliot in “The Wasteland,” but fragments should not, indeed cannot, seek to enlarge the ruin. Codrescu opens New Orleans, Mon Amour with “some prefatory remarks” describing his “radio reports and poetic essay after the Katrina apocalypse” as “eulogies…for something that was and will never be again, no matter how many commissions meet and how far the price of real estate soars. You can rebuild a house, but you can’t restore a soul”; thus, the book comprises “splinters, some of them still warm cinders, from what the city of New Orleans once lit inside of us.”

Physically altered? Absolutely. Fundamentally changed? Certainly. In need of its soul back? I’m skeptical. Last week, I returned to New Orleans for the first time since I moved away from its seductive malaise, anachronistic charms, and conversation-loving populace, and I am heartened to report that they are all still part of the city’s identity, however fragmented. (I saw Codrescu perched familiarly in the window bar at Molly’s at 2 a.m. one night. Molly’s, an Irish bar on Decatur that valiantly stayed open during the worst of Katrina, is the setting and motivation for several stories in New Orleans, Mon Amour.) Soulless, it is not. A palpable pride, like a red badge of courage, runs through its streets and people.

This tattered hope recurs beautifully in Do You Know What It Means to Miss New Orleans?—a quirky, incandescent collection of essays, stories, quotes, and recipes reacting to Katrina. “For those who do not already know,” writes David Rutledge, “humor, beauty, and the blues all live right alongside each other. Even after Katrina, laughter is the best life raft.” On reestablishing culture, he continues, “New Orleans culture is a thing of the past, and the past is a pretty good place to look when the present offers so little.” It should be said that seeking succor in a gruesome golden age has been part of New Orleans’ downfall. Regardless, the intent has always been to achieve redemption, and perhaps now, with more aligned priorities in reclaiming lost time, there is a better shot.

Do You Know What It Means? marks the first literary incarnation of a jazz funeral. Such an inspired idea arriving under such circumstances is bittersweet to say the least. Compiled in only 89 days following Katrina’s hit, this diminutive book is a procession of dirges and celebrations, libations and anecdotes, all in a layout recalling the simplicity and intricate sophistication of McSweeney’s but with none of their all-knowing, wink-wink pretension. Maps, charts, stars, and fin de siècle engravings complement some knee-slapping stories like Ray Shea’s “I Was A Teenage Float Grunt,” C. W. Cannon’s “The New Orleans Manifesto,” and Toni McGee Causey’s “The Annual Tater Launch Party.” It is “A Lesson from Below” by Sarah K. Inmann about an accidental trapeze lesson, though, that surprises by leaving an indelible image in the reader’s mind for days. In future evacuations, this is the book to throw in the suitcase.

Times-Picayune columnist Chris Rose wrote the current top bestselling book in New Orleans, 1 dead in attic, a compendium of his articles since early last September. It is no wonder why only A Confederacy of Dunces and A Streetcar Named Desire trump the number of locals who have devoured this book. Rose’s personal exhaustion in the aftermath, magnified by his duty to report the significance of the devastation, beat his sentences down into pure mental thought—raw, meandering outrage, hurt, anger, and frustration. Consequently, he voiced what many could not articulate but commonly felt. These pieces transport the reader back to the days of chaos and the disillusioned months that followed, constituting a documentary better than any footage.

Finally, the best writing on the subject to date is in the current issue of the New Orleans Review published by Loyola University New Orleans. Foregoing its traditional selection of new prose and poetry, the editors elected to print testimonies and remembrances of the past half year, as well as other evocative works. Ann Gislesn's "The Chain Catches Hold," on living in the Bywater, enlarges the context of the tragedy:

"History, which we lived around and through, both artfully and shamefully, has rushed up to us, violently forcing itself into our lives, and now it’s not only ourselves but the country that must face up to it. Painfully and poignantly, the city was reduced to its municipal footprint of roughly 1878, driving us back and making us rethink the last century of our development, all the vagaries of demography, nature, both human and otherwise, politics, economics, and technology that brought us to where we are today...

"We pass the ubiquitous spray-painted Xs on the houses left by task forces from New Jersey and Texas and animal rescue groups from all over the country that swept through the neighborhood in the days after the deluge looking for survivors and victims, leaving cryptic markings of who they were, the date, what they found or didn't. Terse, urgent narratives scrawled across the fronts of our homes.

"One morning my son pointed excitedly up. 'Look, another X!' In the hard blue fall sky two jet contrails had crossed each other, and for a moment it wasn’t just our houses or city but the whole sky, the world itself, marked for search and rescue."

If you cannot make a trip to New Orleans, which you should, now more than ever, start with some of these reads. X marks the spot.


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