abc, all the news from Beirut at the minute brought to mind a great book I read a few years ago by a Lebanese author (writing in English and now living in the US).
I, the Divine ( < link)by
Rabih Alameddine is a terrifically playful and enjoyable read by a woman who wants to write her autobiography of growing up in Lebanon. The only problem is, she can't decide how best to begin, and so the book consists entirely of first chapters... Here are my thoughts on it from another site a few years ago when I first read it.
The [first chapters only] conceit works brilliantly. Sarah Nour el-Din starts and stops her first chapters, deciding this time to start with her schooldays, this time to begin with her family, this time her lovers, and so on. "How can I expect my readers to know who I am," she says in the introduction (which is of course the last first chapter in the book), "if I do not tell them about my family, my friends, the relationships in my life?" She novelises her life, starts again as a confessional memoir, again as a story of war in Beirut through a child's eyes, again with her present life which all this has brought her to. It has a cumulative effect, rather like William Boyd's
Any Human Heart, and is just as good a "life" as that novel. It is, as we are often promised with books but rarely with accuracy, moving and funny and thoughtful. It is also supremely laconic (you can tell it's not a real woman, heheh):
While I was visiting Beirut years ago, my son, my father, my ex-husband, and I went to see The Unbearable Lightness of Being. The war had recently ended, a few old movie theaters had reopened, running on large generators.
"It's been years since I've seen a movie in a theater," Omar said. Once the film began he worried, considered it inappropriate for Kamal, who slept between opening and closing credits while his father fretted. I sat confused, unable to understand the film, yet enraptured by Daniel Day Lewis and Juliette Binoche.
"Well," my father said, walking out of the theater, "at least they got the unbearable part right."
So I am delighted I put aside my prejudices against authors with funny names or my literary xenophobia and urge everyone to read
I, the Divine. To utter a sentence I would not even have understood this time last week, let alone said:
I can't wait for Rabih Alameddine's next one.
I'll think about it though.
