All Shook Up About Elvis in Iraq

It doesn’t hurt to be the first daughter’s boyfriend if you want to be published. For Ian Klaus, former boyfriend of Chelsea Clinton, getting a deal from Alfred A. Knopf publishing house was probably not so difficult. Indeed, George Andreou, Klaus’ publisher at Knopf, admitted to knowing of the relationship between Klaus and the Clintons before reading his transcript.

To be fair, the premise of Elvis is Titanic, Klaus’ first book, would garner the interest of many a publisher, as said premise involves his year of teaching English and American history in war-torn Iraqi Kurdistan. The Oxford-educated Rhodes Scholar spends a semester at Salahaddin University lecturing on the likes of Thomas Jefferson and Muhammad Ali, attempting to give the students there a basic survey of the literature and history of the United States.

With Elvis is Titanic, Klaus has published a memoir at the age of 28—but the book’s scope is even more narrow than this limitation would imply. It begins with the author’s journey from Islamabad, Turkey into Arbil, Iraq where the university is located. From the outset, he focuses on how different and bleak the lives of Iraqis are from those of Americans. The streets are run down, there’s little technology, the roads are dangerous—everything that one would expect to hear about a relatively underdeveloped nation in the middle of a war zone.

The greatest flaw in Klaus’ writing style is precisely that: there is little that we can’t derive from the reader’s own education and imagination on what life in Iraqi Kurdistan is like. Expectedly, the students speak broken English and ask lots of questions about life in the United States, and they are very curious about Hollywood stars and American music. They love Elvis and Titanic, and one student even proclaims “Elvis is Titanic,” the phrase that gives the book its title. The chapters have charming names as well and match the rather hopeful and upbeat tone of the book. Take “English I: Travel, Globalization, and Hollywood” as one example.

Klaus is no journalist. This becomes a problem, because he uses the opening pages to explain his perspective on the political and social problems pervading Kurdistan, intermixing memoir and historical narrative. Disappointingly, he mostly uses the ideas of other writers in order to substantiate his claims: block quotes from the likes of Joyce Appleby, T.S. Eliot, Bernard Lewis, and Mahmood Mamdani litter the first four chapters alone.

He continues this method throughout the rest of the relatively short book—it is just 231 pages long—and presents the literature of Thomas Jefferson, Ernest Hemingway, Langston Hughes, and Zora Neale Hurston while providing very little detail on how the students responded to the texts or how he presented these diverse authors to them. He doesn’t give his students a voice, which will inevitably leave readers wishing they got to know them better.

There are moments, however, when Klaus becomes intensely thought-provoking and humorous, particularly when we meet a national election official old enough to be Klaus’ father on election day in January 2005. It is as pleasant and bizarre as all random meetings are: stuck in the corner of a voting room with him, Klaus notices his Nokia lanyard and says “Good phones” in a feeble attempt to make conversation. The man replies, “Red. I am a Communist. You see it’s red. Me Communist. Are you Communist?.” Klaus: “No. No, I am not a Communist.” And the man: “You are not a Communist? ... Chicago. Chicago is a nice city ... I’m a Christian. Are you a Christian?” And so Klaus meets his Chicago-loving, Christian Communist friend in a chance encounter thousands of miles from home and uses the moment to illustrate how dynamic, and truly bizarre, a life abroad can sometimes be.

Readers will understand the uniqueness of the experience and the many lives that Klaus has touched. What is troubling is his inability to express those poignant moments more effectively. There is no doubt that Ian Klaus is an intellectual, but writing does not necessarily seem to be his forte. Yes, Bill Clinton said of the memoir, “In Elvis Is Titanic, Ian Klaus tells the extraordinary story of his time teaching in Iraqi Kurdistan ... A fine book by an exceptional young man.” Perhaps he judged too personally on the matter, perhaps not. If Klaus were able to stay in Kurdistan after the locals found out about his high-profile relationship with Chelsea Clinton, he may have been able to experience enough to provide a more insightful narrative than this one.