Synopses & Reviews
Origins, by the world-renowned writer Amin Maalouf, is a sprawling, hemisphere-spanning intergenerational saga. Set during the last quarter of the nineteenth century and the first quarter of the twentieth, in the mountains of Lebanon and in Havana, Cuba, origins recounts the family history of the generation of Maaloufs paternal grandfather, Boutros Maalouf: Why did Boutros, a poet and educator in Lebanon, travel across the globe to rescue his younger brother, Gebrayel, who had settled in Havana?
Maalouf is an energetic and amiable narrator, illuminating the more obscure corners of late Ottoman nationalism, the psychology of Lebanese sectarianism, and the dynamics of family quarrels. He moves with great agility across time and space, and across genres of writing. But he never loses track of his storys central thread: his quest to lift the shadow of legend from his familys past.
Origins is at once a gripping family chronicle and a timely consideration of Lebanese culture and politics. Amin Maalouf was a journalist in Lebanon until the civil war in 1975, when he left for Paris with his family. His work has been translated into more than forty languages, and his books have won prestigious prizes, including the Prix Goncourt. Origins is at once a personal, family chronicle and a timely consideration of Lebanese culture and politics. Set during the last quarter of the nineteenth century and the first quarter of the twentiethin the mountains of Lebanon and in Havana, CubaOrigins is a hemisphere-spanning, intergenerational story by world-renowned writer Amin Maalouf. The book recounts the family history of the generation of Maaloufs paternal grandfather, Boutros Maalouf. Maalouf sets out to discover why Boutros, a poet and educator in Lebanon, traveled across the globe to rescue his younger brother, Gebrayel, who had settled in Havana. His search for the true story becomes an excavation of a familys hidden past.
Maalouf is an energetic and amiable narrator, illuminating the more obscure corners of late Ottoman nationalism, the psychology of Lebanese sectarianism, and the dynamics of family quarrels. He moves with great agility across time and space, and across genres of writing. But he never loses track of his storys central thread: his quest to lift the shadow of legend from his familys past. "Along comes Amin Maalouf with his lovely, complex memoir, Origins, to remind us that Arab identity is as fluid, unsettled and ever-changing as the Mediterranean Sea where it kisses the shores of Lebanon, his country of origin, and France, where he has lived for the last 30 years . . . Maalouf doesnt only want to illuminate family history or amplify stories barely whispered for a hundred years; instead, he strives to reveal the fecund variety of his own family, of Arab life and history, of history itself. In doing so, he offers a lesson in the value of impermanence and shifting sands . . . Maalouf wants nothing more than to unwind the long scarf of memory and history, not to make a claim, but in celebration of human dignity, endeavor and 'wanderers who have lost their way.' He is one of that small handful of writers, like David Grossman and Ayaan Hirsi Ali, who are indispensable to us in our current crisis."Jonathan Wilson, The New York Times Book Review "Along comes Amin Maalouf with his lovely, complex memoir, Origins, to remind us that Arab identity is as fluid, unsettled and ever-changing as the Mediterranean Sea where it kisses the shores of Lebanon, his country of origin, and France, where he has lived for the last 30 years . . . In Origins, Maalouf focuses mainly on his grandfather Botros, a schoolteacher who, having failed in business (he wanted to grow tobacco in the Bekaa plain), lives instead 'between notebooks and inkwells'; and on his more successfully entrepreneurial great uncle Gebrayel (his grandfathers younger brother), who left Lebanon in late 1895 for the United States and three years later for Cuba. They are a study in contrasts. Botros, a dandified intellectual determined to bring enlightenment to his corner of the mountains, scandalously refuses to have his children baptized, sets up a 'Universal School' and roams his village bareheaded in a suit and cape, while Gebrayel establishes a successful retail business in Havana, only to die there under tragic circumstances . . . The descriptions of his brief sojourn in Havanafrustrations and impasses followed by an unexpected denouement involving a long-lost cousinare the most gripping and evocative chapters in the memoir . . . Maalouf doesnt only want to illuminate family history or amplify stories barely whispered for a hundred years; instead, he strives to reveal the fecund variety of his own family, of Arab life and history, of history itself. In doing so, he offers a lesson in the value of impermanence and shifting sands . . . Maalouf wants nothing more than to unwind the long scarf of memory and history, not to make a claim, but in celebration of human dignity, endeavor and 'wanderers who have lost their way.' He is one of that small handful of writers, like David Grossman and Ayaan Hirsi Ali, who are indispensable to us in our current crisis."Jonathan Wilson, The New York Times Book Review "When Amin Maalouf, the faithful chronicler of this meticulously reconstructed family memoir, finally meets a distant elderly descendant of the Cuban Branch of his Lebanese family, it is surprisingly moving. Maalouf's memoir focuses on two brothershis grandfather Botros and his great-uncle Gebrayeland their separate lives, one in Havana, the other in the Lebanese village of Machrah . . . In exhaustive detail, Maalouf locates and describes the conflicting values among the family members and provides a history not only of his clan but of his country."Barbara Fisher, The Boston Globe
"Amin Maalouf is a novelist and journalist who left his native Lebanon over 30 years ago to live in Paris. In this memoir, he focuses on the life of his grandfather Boutros who also contemplated leaving his homeland, over and over again, but never did; Boutros was urged to leave by his brother, Gebrayel, who had emigrated to Cuba. Maalouf gives us not only the arc of these two men's lives, but an account of how he found his history by mining his relative's memories, along with letters and documents (the family has always had a strong relationship with the written word; Maalouf possesses an ancient book detailing his genealogy and a trunk of papers saved by his mother.) This memoir illuminates the way we make narrative out of pieces of fact and rumor and also serves as a revealing glimpse into the complexities of a part of the world to which nationhood came late and where borders remain unusually porous and slippery. Boutros was a poet, an educator who believed that girls should be in the classroom along with boys, an eccentric iconoclast who dressed as he pleased, going about his village bareheaded and with a black cape swirling around his shoulders. he believedsometimes despairinglyin the perfectibility of his homeland, hoping, according to his grandson, 'to build our own United States at home in the Levant, a federation of the different Ottoman provinces, where the diverse communities would coexist, where everyone would read the newspapers, and where corruption and arbitrary rule would no longer prevail.' The pace of the book is magisterial . . . A journey well worth taking, an elegant meditation on mortality and our relationship to the past."Juliet Wittman, The Washington Post Book World
"Intriguing . . . Maalouf's setting is the Greek Catholic villages of Mount Lebanon, and his story runs roughly from the latter part of the nineteenth century to the early years of the twentieth . . . He also focuses on two stories and describes a heady period of fluctuating authority, frustrated opportunities and new notions of citizenship and belonging. The first story concerns his paternal grandfather, Botros; the second, his great-uncle Gebrayel, who left Lebanon for the Americas at 18."Moustafa Bayoumi, The Nation
"These are dispiriting times for Arab liberals . . . In his family memoir, Origins, Amin Maalouf . . . recalls a different time, a hundred years ago, when Arab liberalism was briefly at its zenith. Enlightenment ideals of rationality, liberty, and progress were zealously championed by schoolteachers and scientists, freemasons and poets, across the planetand not least in the Arab world, where many of the leading reformers were, like Maalouf and his ancestors, Lebanese Christians. Writing as a detective-historian, Maalouf has ransacked old chests and the fading memories of relatives to tell the story of a forgotten man of the Enlightenmenthis grandfather Boutros. Born in the late 1880s, Boutros was a libertine, a man of letters and a small-town philosophe, whose story Maalouf subtly shows to be all too timely. His efforts to improve his homeland illustrate the messianic hopes and bitter disappointments of a Levantine liberalism that is still half-born . . . Boutros dreamed of a Levant where it didn't matter whether you were a Presbyterian or Greek Catholic or Freemason, never mind Christian or Muslim or Jew. Maalouf warmly pays tribute to those ideals even as his memoir acknowledges his grandfather's frailtiesand even as Lebanon's recent strife testifies to the gap between the promise of a liberal cosmopolitan state and the reality. In preserving the memory of one man's Enlightenment project, as quixotic in his own time as it would be in ours, Maalouf suggests a sobering message: If Boutros' ideals, and the words that expressed them, strike us as embarrassing or out of place, perhaps the fault is in us."Alexander Star, Slate "Maalouf's novels re-create the thrill of childhood reading, that primitive mixture of learning about something unknown or unimagined."Claire Messud, The Guardian "Expatriate Lebanese novelist Maalouf explores the gap between family legend and family history. The author begins and ends with the death of his father, who fatally surrendered to a stroke on the anniversary of his own father's death. Sifting through a trunk of correspondence, photographs and ephemera, Maalouf's obsession grew as he discovered that his kin's story unfolded in several countries and was intricately tied to the history of another household in the same village in Lebanon. Traveling through time and space as he tracked the evolution of his family, Maalouf learned that his grandfather, Boutros, staunchly refused to baptize his six children, believing that true spirituality resulted from education and choice. Boutros's brother, a devout Catholic and member of the clergy, deemed both his methods and his marriage to a Protestant woman reprehensible. In addition to the struggle between Catholicism and Protestantism, other tensions brewed between those who emigrated and those who stayed, between living family members and the dead they remembered. Maalouf's narrative gains in emotional immediacy from its lack of the polished presentation often found in memoirs. We witness him sobbing on his Paris apartment floor in front of the trunk, devastated to realize how much he doesn't know. We rejoice with him at finding the decorated tomb of his great uncle, who emigrated to Havana and earned success unobtainable to his relatives in Lebanon. While exploring his own history, Maalouf inevitably stumbles across the effects of events played on the larger screen of his country and the world, such as the Young Turk Revolution of 1908 and World War I. His kin's reactions to tragedies and triumphs both personal and universal add to the book's vibrant texture and tone. A shimmering portrait of a clan molded by history and personal whim."Kirkus Reviews
"In this sensitive . . . memoir of long-held secrets, betrayal and denial, Maalouf, who won the 1993 Prix Goncourt for Rock of Tanios, traces his familial history from a tiny mountainside village in Lebanon to Cuba and back. Presented, upon the death of his father, with a 'trunkful of documents,' Maalouf sifts through the detritus of letters, journals and diary entries in search of information on his great uncle Gebrayel, whose life is swathed in family legends. 'At eighteen, he simply boarded a ship leaving for America,' Maalouf writes of Gebrayel, but after a three-year sojourn in New York City, he emigrated to Cuba. Maalouf pieces together Gebrayel's Cuban life, quoting extensively from his letters. The author also exerts much literary effort conjuring up the internal machinations of a family torn asunder by societal changes, the internecine clash of local religious beliefs and growing family enmity toward their wayward uncle. In the end, Maalouf travels to Cuba and, with the help of a plucky distant relative, finds the location of Gebrayel's house."Publishers Weekly
Review
Praise for Amin Maalouf and
Origins“Maalouf doesnt only want to illuminate family history or amplify stories barely whispered for a hundred years; instead, he strives to reveal the fecund variety of his own family, of Arab life and history, of history itself. In doing so, he offers a lesson in the value of impermanence and shifting sands . . . Maalouf wants nothing more than to unwind the long scarf of memory and history, not to make a claim, but in celebration of human dignity, endeavor and 'wanderers who have lost their way.' He is one of that small handful of writers, like David Grossman and Ayaan Hirsi Ali, who are indispensable to us in our current crisis.” —Jonathan Wilson, The New York Times Book Review
“A journey well worth taking, an elegant meditation on mortality and our relationship to the past.” —Juliet Wittman, The Washington Post Book World
“In this riveting and intriguing memoir, [Maalouf] describes himself and his family as a rather nomadic clan, without deep emotional ties to place or religious affiliation . . . The result is an excellent family saga that also works as a mystery and even as a discourse on the political culture of Lebanon. Maalouf is a gifted writer; he has a knack for maintaining dramatic tension as he reveals his efforts to uncover his familys secrets, layer by layer, as his search extends over three continents. This is an intensely personal and compelling story.” —Jay Freeman, Booklist
“A profound journey of self-discovery.” —Rayyan Al-Shawaf, Bookforum
“Maaloufs narrative gains in emotional immediacy from its lack of the polished presentation often found in memoirs…His kins reactions to tragedies and triumphs both personal and universal add to the books vibrant texture and tone. A shimmering portrait of a clan molded by history and personal whim.”—Kirkus Reviews
“What do you get when one of the Arab worlds greatest writers, a Prix-Goncourt-winning historical novelist, decides to write a memoir? A marvel. Amin Maalouf has given us the engrossing story of his grandfather, a prescient, remarkable man, as well as the story of his time and place—how the Middle East was formed, politically, geographically, historically, and not least, psychologically. An extraordinary achievement.” —Rabih Alameddine, author of The Hakawati
“Maaloufs novels re-create the thrill of childhood reading, that primitive mixture of learning about something unknown or unimagined . . .” —Claire Messud, The Guardian
“One of the best European writers to have emerged in the last decade.” —Kirkus Reviews
“Maalouf skillfully weaves the threads of contemporary history into his fictional narratives . . . In each of his books, he takes a historical figure about whom few facts are known, puts him in the context of this time and place and adds a myriad of invented but historically plausible details. The finished portraits have the intricate richness of oriental tapestries.” —International Herald Tribune
“What is common to Maalouf's wide-ranging works—six of his novels have been translated into English—is his apparent belief that through examining and understanding a particular historical period we can gain a better understanding of our present time. Indeed, if you want to understand what's going on in the world at this moment, you could certainly do worse than to read Maalouf on the past.” —Ian Sansom, The Guardian
Synopsis
Origins, by the world-renowned writer Amin Maalouf, is a sprawling, hemisphere-spanning intergenerational saga. Set during the last quarter of the nineteenth century and the first quarter of the twentieth, in the mountains of Lebanon and in Havana, Cuba, origins recounts the family history of the generation of Maaloufs paternal grandfather, Boutros Maalouf: Why did Boutros, a poet and educator in Lebanon, travel across the globe to rescue his younger brother, Gebrayel, who had settled in Havana?
Maalouf is an energetic and amiable narrator, illuminating the more obscure corners of late Ottoman nationalism, the psychology of Lebanese sectarianism, and the dynamics of family quarrels. He moves with great agility across time and space, and across genres of writing. But he never loses track of his storys central thread: his quest to lift the shadow of legend from his familys past.
Origins is at once a gripping family chronicle and a timely consideration of Lebanese culture and politics.
About the Author
Amin Maalouf was a journalist in Lebanon until the civil war in 1975, when he left for Paris with his family. His work has been translated into more than forty languages, and his books have won prestigious prizes, including the Prix Goncourt.