From Professor Michel Verdon
Department of Anthropology (specialist Arabo-Islamic world)
Université de Montréal
Dear Jad,
After many weeks (or months…), Lina delivered the copy of your book that you so kindly sent us. An avid reader of novels, Heather read it as soon as she finished the book she was reading, and was very impressed. She will tell you that I am not a novel reader. I read about one novel a year, when there is nothing else to do… But she strongly recommended your novel and, God, was she right. It’s a beautiful, powerful, moving novel. It starts slowly, but you already feel the clouds, there is something ominous in the air. And the pace quickens, as does the unease of the reader. You know that something is bound to happen, but nothing does directly to Adam and family. And then, when Sana falls in love with Faour, the book turns into a page turner, the crescendo rises exponentially. It haunted me.
Congratulations. First, it’s a book that all Lebanese should read; it should be compulsory reading at the end of secondary school, before university, or in the first year of university. Then, it’s also a book that anyone interested in the manner in which political events add up to major personal upheavals, anyone interested in the interplay of life and death, in the sickness and madness of politics, should also read. At a lighter level, I loved the ethnographic bits, the way you evoke something that perhaps never was but is the myth needed to keep the community together, the relationships between husbands and wives and between generations before the war. And then, interwoven through all this, you show, slowly but surely, how everything starts crumbling, until the final collapse; the slow, but unstoppable crescendo. It is a very masterly demonstration, a spell-binding book, a mixture of dreams and dreadful reality, the creation of a very good artist. I am still under its spell, and looking forward to the next one!
Department of Anthropology (specialist Arabo-Islamic world)
Université de Montréal
Dear Jad,
After many weeks (or months…), Lina delivered the copy of your book that you so kindly sent us. An avid reader of novels, Heather read it as soon as she finished the book she was reading, and was very impressed. She will tell you that I am not a novel reader. I read about one novel a year, when there is nothing else to do… But she strongly recommended your novel and, God, was she right. It’s a beautiful, powerful, moving novel. It starts slowly, but you already feel the clouds, there is something ominous in the air. And the pace quickens, as does the unease of the reader. You know that something is bound to happen, but nothing does directly to Adam and family. And then, when Sana falls in love with Faour, the book turns into a page turner, the crescendo rises exponentially. It haunted me.
Congratulations. First, it’s a book that all Lebanese should read; it should be compulsory reading at the end of secondary school, before university, or in the first year of university. Then, it’s also a book that anyone interested in the manner in which political events add up to major personal upheavals, anyone interested in the interplay of life and death, in the sickness and madness of politics, should also read. At a lighter level, I loved the ethnographic bits, the way you evoke something that perhaps never was but is the myth needed to keep the community together, the relationships between husbands and wives and between generations before the war. And then, interwoven through all this, you show, slowly but surely, how everything starts crumbling, until the final collapse; the slow, but unstoppable crescendo. It is a very masterly demonstration, a spell-binding book, a mixture of dreams and dreadful reality, the creation of a very good artist. I am still under its spell, and looking forward to the next one!
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