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"Alameddine, Rabih"
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The hakawati
In 2003, Osama al-Kharrat returns to Beirut after many years in America to stand vigil at his father's deathbed. The city is a shell of the Beirut Osama remembers, but he and his friends and family take solace in the things that have always sustained them: gossip, laughter, and, above all, stories. Osama's grandfather was a hakawati, or storyteller, and his bewitching stories--of his arrival in Lebanon, an orphan of the Turkish wars, and of how he earned the name al-Kharrat, the fibster--are interwoven with classic tales of the Middle East, stunningly reimagined. Here are Abraham and Isaac; Ishmael, father of the Arab tribes; the ancient, fabled Fatima; and Baybars, the slave prince who vanquished the Crusaders. Here, too, are contemporary Lebanese whose stories tell a larger, heartbreaking tale of seemingly endless war--and of survival.--From publisher description.
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Comforting Myths
Before he died, my father reminded me that when I was four and he asked what I wanted to be when I grew up, I said I wanted to be a writer. Of course, what I meant by writer then was a writer of Superman comics. In part I was infatuated with the practically invulnerable Man of Steel, his blue eyes and his spit curl. I wanted both to be him and to marry him, to be his Robin, so to speak. But more importantly, I wanted to write his story, the adventures of the man who fought for truth,
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In-Country
Waiting for my father, I stood by the banister and stared at the living room below. A spherical crystal chandelier hung from the cathedral ceiling down to the lower level. Two-story floor-to-ceiling windows dominated the lower room. Their layers of drapes, as dense and heavy as a theater curtain, the same colors and pattern as the wallpaper, gold with stylized metallic gray-blue paisley peacocks. The wall-to-wall carpeting was inches deep and avocado green.
I walked into the first room, the same avocado carpet and wallpaper in dark rose with a large white floral pattern, matching the bed and curtains. The
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