Confessions

How do you carry on with life after a past like this? The distinguished Lebanese writer Rabee Jaber provides an answer, a cry from the heart, in this little controlled explosion of a book. There is the first sentence: “My father used to kidnap people and kill them.” The narrator, Maroun, who doesn’t even know what his birth name was because he was taken in by his “father” after everyone with him (parents, siblings…) was slaughtered in an ambush. Maroun was left in the car wounded. If the bullet that hit him had entered his chest an inch to one side, he’d have been dead. In adulthood looking back on the chaos that was his youth, he speculates that his father took him in to replace his own son, who had died shortly before. Maroun grew up with a fake family –loving mother, distant father, brother, sisters— in the midst of near constant war. That didn’t stop the family from being close but it adds another layer of dislocation when later, entering adulthood, Maroun’s real past is unveiled to him. The dislocations and trauma of war: as a child, he couldn’t play soccer outdoors because of the risk of sniper fire. Friends and neighbors who were blown away by gunfire and bombs. His family never used their sitting room because “it was open and exposed to shelling.” Planes passed by so close that the beds shivered. The Civil War, Black Saturday, the One Hundred Days’ War, the Two-Year War, the Mountain War…. A book store he used to visit burned down –was it during the War of Elimination or the War of Liberation, he forgets which. Seventy people hide in a cramped, dark basement shelter, an old woman snoring in a corner. During a break from battle, a man sits on a roof top and pulls out a sack to show his trophies. It looks like a bag full of glass marbles but they’re eyeballs, human eyeballs, trophies of war. His mother dies before the end of the wars, his father next, his brother and sisters move on and some out of Beirut for good. Maroun attends the American University of Beirut and graduates an engineer. He likes numbers, certainties. He gets on with his life. “New memories [form] on top of the old ones, and one floor buries another. My dreams have changed.” But have they? Again, the question I posed at the head of this review: How do you carry on with life after a past like Maroun’s?

Finalist for the 2017 PEN Translation Prize. This short novel explores the coming of age of a young boy during the Lebanese Civil War. The boy is the sole survivor of an attack on a family, is adopted by one of the assassins, and is raised in this new family. The book is written in a straightforward, unadorned style and is good in its portrayal of life in the violence and chaos of war and in its exploration of themes such as self and memory. However, the characters do not engage the reader, and many of the novel’s themes – especially that of memory – become somewhat repetitious and are largely left unresolved.

Trauma in youth. All problems of remembering...