DISCOVERIES

-----

Flushed

How the Plumber Saved Civilization

W. Hodding Carter

Atria Books: 242 pp., $24

WHAT is PVC made of? What was it like to spend a day in the Roman baths? What lies beneath the streets of cities like New York? What’s so fascinating about a sewage treatment plant? Why are we so squeamish about waste? While doing a little plumbing himself (as his wife, in her eighth month of pregnancy with twins, is at work), writer W. Hodding Carter decides to become a plumber: “I told my wife about my epiphany. She’d just come home from work and had a pained look on her face. Upon my proclamation, she merely nodded and asked if it was now okay to use the bathroom.”

Carter didn’t become a plumber, but he remained fascinated by the profession. The result is “Flushed,” part history, part “plumbing reverie” and part portrait of a man intrigued by how things work. His account of the life and training of a plumber is particularly delightful: “You might drive around in a flashy red German convertible, laughing at the peasants walking down the street, but your plumber knows the truth about you ... that in the end, you’re just one of us.”

-----

I, Nadia, Wife

of a Terrorist

Baya Gacemi

Translated from the French by Paul Cote and Constantina Mitchell

University of Nebraska Press: 160 pp., $50 cloth, $24.95 paper

GROWING up in war-torn Algeria in the 1990s, 16-year-old Nadia believed that marriage would be a way out of the restrictive and often brutal life imposed on women by the 1984 Family Code inspired by sharia (Muslim religious law).

Raised in a socialist village built for farmworkers around state-owned farms south of Algiers, Nadia was surrounded by guerrilla fighters, members of the underground Algerian Islamist resistance. Her husband was a rebel extremist who went from a life of petty theft to emir, or leader, of the Armed Islamic Group.

On their wedding night, he forced Nadia to recite the Koran and called her unclean for wearing nail polish. From that night on, she became the “mother of the faithful,” a glorified servant for his terrorist brothers. She cooked and cleaned for as many as 12 of them living in her small home. Beaten repeatedly by her husband and also by her father (for endangering the family), she rebelled against them and the police who arrested and threatened her in order to catch her husband.

“I, Nadia, Wife of a Terrorist,” first published in 1998 in France, is based on journalist Baya Gacemi’s interviews with the 22-year-old she named Nadia to protect her identity. Nadia’s husband’s decapitated body had been found, and she was living, as she does today, with her son and a host family. Nadia’s voice has the clarity of Anne Frank or Zlata Filipovic, the young diarist from Sarajevo. Her story adds immeasurably to our empathy for victims of violence everywhere and to our understanding of the roots of terrorism.

-----

Absent

Betool Khedairi

Translated from the Arabic by Muhayman Jamil

American University in Cairo Press: 214 pp., $22.95

IRAQI novelist Betool Khedairi imagines a Baghdad apartment building full of characters and domestic dramas and surrounded by war in “Absent.” Fortuneteller Umm Mazin lives upstairs; a sad young nurse comes home each day with stories from the hospital’s children’s ward; a black rain falls on the building after bombings. Every so often, someone is arrested; neighbors inform on each other.

Dalal, the novel’s narrator, was 4 months old when her parents were killed in their car by a land mine left over from a war in 1967. Dalal was hurled out the front window and landed in the sand. Now a young woman living with her aunt and uncle, who tend bees and sell honey, she has fallen in love.

There’s something funny, desperate and familiar in these characters’ stories, in their efforts to create a peaceful life. They reminisce about the “Days of Plenty.” They part the curtains to reveal a city covered in ash.