14 - 20 June 2001
Issue No.538
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Al-Ahram Weekly Online 14 - 20 June 2001 Issue No.538 |
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Like the constant hum of a longed-for joy
Ports of Call (Les Echelles du Levant), Amin Maalouf,Transl. Alberto Manguel, London: Harvill Press, 2001. pp197
Amin Maalouf is now internationally regarded as one of the great literary voices of the Arab world and one of the best authors writing in French today. His novels and historical works have been translated into many languages, and in 1993 he was awarded France's most prestigious literary award -- the Prix Goncourt. Ports of Call, his latest book to be published in English, tells the life story of one face amidst many others in an old World War II photograph, of a young man with an awed smile on a return ship from Liberated France as it docks into Beirut.
The novel's narrator, sexless and nameless but a witness and a listener, bumps into this face in the streets of Paris in 1976, and, recognising the man from the photo in a history book, follows him to ask him his story. The man to whom the face belongs, Ossyane Ketabdar, is the great-grandson of one of the last Ottoman sultans, the grandson of a madwoman, and the son of a foghorn ideologue -- a talker, photographer and waning grandee. His first name, Ossyane, means "revolt, rebellion, or disobedience." Studying medicine in the southern French port city of Marseilles, he is slowly, and it seems unwittingly, sucked into the French Resistance following the German invasion of France in World War II. He becomes one of the movement's heroes, and while a member of the Resistance he meets Clara, a Jewish woman, whom he loves and marries, and with whom he fathers a daughter. However, the two are later separated in 1947, never to meet again.
Buried in Ports of Call lies a beautiful love story, but the novel also contains an account of much of the shattered twentieth-century history of the Middle East, much of its potential having been crippled and burnt on the wayside of European politics. As an allegory of promises betrayed and of tortured hopes, the novel reads like a fable or fairy tale, where values more fluid and powerful than the rigid adherence to strict principles are forced to play themselves out amongst the ogres and witches of twentieth-century political reality. Ossyane, grand and well-born as he is, resembles "the Idiot," or unknowing, holy fool of many such stories, his nobility representing something of the old noblesse d'esprit of an Arab world crippled by war and tragedy.
Throughout the novel values such as the need for attention, courage, love and humility resonate and become infectious, like the constant hum of a longed-for joy. Ossyane himself treats such values as dated, as does his wife, being aware that notions such as heroism and valour have long passed out of fashion. But to the reader they are the echoes of a deep goodness and the predicate of the sense of hope that suffuses the book and the gentleness that weaves its way through the writing.
As the novel closes, and the first narrator's voice leaves Ossyane at the Quai de l'Horloge in Paris, the narrative returns to that fading photograph lost in a Lebanese textbook of the 1950s. The novel as a whole is the tale of such a snapshot, or the exegesis of such an historical footnote, and in this beautiful, carefully written book, Maalouf has told a story of immense humanity against a backdrop of war.
Reviewed by Turi Munthe
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