KEY POINTS:
Migration and its consequences for the migrant and the community he leaves have become one of the topical political and artistic themes but there are people for whom the flight into exile has been an abiding concern for generations.
Few groups exemplify this more than the Lebanese,
frequently gifted and entrepreneurial, and coming from a land where an extraordinary historic mixture of cultures has produced a divided society always quivering with tension. Amin Maalouf is typical.
Born in Beirut as a Catholic Arab, he plied his trade as a journalist and writer, mainly for Arab media, covering wars in his home area and abroad. But in 1977, as the bloody conflicts in his homeland spiralled into chaos, he emigrated to France and has lived in Paris ever since. His mother was the child of a Maronite Christian father, who had left his mountain village to work in Egypt, and a mother born in Turkey.
Amin's father, Ruchdi, was from the Melkite Greek Catholic community. But there was also a Presbyterian side to the family, with some being educated in American-founded Protestant schools. The writer himself was educated at French Jesuit schools. Maalouf's fiction has frequently dealt with the tangles of inheritance and in this book, described as a memoir, he embarks on a genealogical quest to unravel the truth behind some of the family myths, particularly those concerning his grand- father Botros, and Botros' brother, Gebrayel. The siblings represent two main strands of the family chronicles.
Botros is a rationalist often at odds with the religious members of the family and a compulsive writer of poetry. Although he flirts with the idea of emigration, he stays in Lebanon as a teacher while Gebrayel settles in Cuba and establishes a successful business as part of the extraordinary Lebanese diaspora. One villager tells Maalouf: "You've been living in France too long where every village has a cemetery and monuments bearing lists of all those who died in the various wars. Here, families have sons buried in Beirut, Egypt, Argentina, Brazil, Mexico Australia and the United States ...
Our fate is to be scattered in death as we were in life." Reading Maalouf's hunt for traces of his ancestors has the detective story fascination reminiscent of the British television series Who Do You Think You Are, although Maalouf was not starting from scratch. Coming from the Ottoman Empire in which the modern sense of identification with a nation state was nebulous, the Lebanese sense of continuity has always been tied up with family.
A family historian a century earlier had compiled an encyclopaedic family chronicle. He also had a huge family archive of correspondence and notebooks but, as ever, there was so much assumed and unstated in these letters that he had to fill in yawning gaps.
Maalouf has a novelist's eye and as the book progresses the historic characters grow into individuals filled with life. But they are also representative of the forces that have created the story of his people, particularly religion.
At the end of his journeys, Maalouf quotes a maxim of his mother's: "The absence of religion is a tragedy for families, the excess of religion too" and comments, "today I am prone to think that this holds true for all human societies". He also notes that when his great-grandfather died there were tributes to him in the Arabic newspapers but also in the Jewish journals which "brings back my recurrent nostalgia for the blessed period when there was no war between Jews and Arabs, no enmity, no particular hostility".
Maalouf's writing, translated from the French by Catherine Temerson, has that leisurely, philosophical, discursive style characteristic of the elite end of French journalism and there are times when the more impatient reader might wish he would press on with his journey of discovery. But there is a growing emotional involvement and an awareness of the events of how the past shapes today's lives.
Origins
By Amin Maalouf (Picador $49.99)
* John Gardner is an Auckland reviewer.