Reviews

This was an interesting one for me, with the different narratives that the book has I felt I was lost at the beginning and didn’t know who was narrating. But after a couple of chapters, it started to get better. The book was arranged as a collection of thoughts, letters, and speeches that tackled the Lebanese civil war and gave a rich historical and cultural background of the region, and also shed some light on the AIDS epidemic and gay community. The book covered many strong points on these topics and other topics such as art, love, death, family, identity, and nationalism but also cut the seriousness with humor. Which I found changed my mood towards the book in a good way.

archytas's review against another edition

Go to review page

challenging emotional reflective slow-paced

Plot- or character-driven? Character
Strong character development? Yes
Loveable characters? Yes
Diverse cast of characters? Yes
Flaws of characters a main focus? It's complicated

5.0

I finished this book this morning, and had this sense all day that the world was a little better, richer, more sharply coloured: occasionally I would forget that this was not everyone's experience, they hadn't all just read a truly great book, and given it was published 25 years ago, not terribly likely any of them had read it recently.
It isn't a simple read. I got halfway through and decided to stop and start again, for starters. I realised I hadn't been paying enough attention, didn't have my cast straight, had been confusing characters based on superficial similarities. It may have been that I am a particularly sloppy reader, but it also felt as if this was partially deliberate: this is a book which rewards your attention and quietly asks you to question your own complicity in what you don't look at.
On the whole, it is not a quiet book. There is a ferocity to the writing: Alameddine is very, very angry - but his anger does not simplify or blunt the delicacy of the stories here. It is an anger underpinned by sorrow and exhaustion and grief. These characters most of all demand to be seen, and when you do see them, they reward you with laughter and warmth and survival and passion. These are characters who hold rescue friends from a collapsing bomb site, but can't accept their gay son until he too is dying. They are gay men whose casual racism jostles with emotional support. There is culture, and connection and the determination to live in the face of so much death.
The book deals with both the war in Lebanon and the AIDS epidemic in the USA in the 1980s and 1990s. Similarities and differences resonate through the experiences in Lebanon and San Francisco. But the book is doing far more than playing these as contrasting notes: it is building a story about how worlds are abandoned and forgotten, flattened into anecdote or a tut-tut for a distant tragedy. One of my favourite passages includes an attempt at a failed play, a dialogue between two upper class Lebanese women - one living in Paris, one visiting from Beirut. These women gossip glibly about the war and the AIDS epidemic, neither of which appears to have deeply touched their ivory tower lives. Yet these women - the sophisticates of Beirut - are in turn erased by a war narrative that portrays their homeland as a hotbed of terrorism, barbarity and chaos. Another thread explores the emptiness of how the US engages with other cultures, without denigrating the cultural contribution of that community:
"Most of the art critics who reviewed his work were not Lebanese. I felt they missed quite a bit in his paintings. I learned a thousand and one new things about his painting from their writing, yet they never asked what we saw
The book is vignette-based, from a group of interconnected characters, some of whom have dementia. This allows a huge amount of content - ideas, characterisation, commentary - to be crammed in without much need for exposition or plot beats. Some passages read like news extracts, some are trippy dreams, many are savagely funny quips. But as I started with, it also rewards persistence, the whole weaves not only into stories about those we forget, but also into a story about how we remember, connect and create communities. If these are not seen by Reagan or the media, they are no less rich and integrated. This is at heart a story about people who love, and how fierce and rewarding that love is, even under fire and pestilence. It is a reminder perhaps that what matters is not always survival, but how we impact each other.

"In America, I fit, but I do not belong. In Lebanon, I belong, but I do not fit."

ameliag's review against another edition

Go to review page

5.0

4.75

sumactots99's review against another edition

Go to review page

Plot- or character-driven? Character
Strong character development? N/A
Loveable characters? It's complicated
Diverse cast of characters? Yes
Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes

Damn that Yoko!

dfparizeau's review against another edition

Go to review page

4.0

A rare gem from my undergrad. A real masterpiece in terms of form and narrative--you will be as gripped as you will be disoriented. This is a crippling read, not one for those wanting light and accessible fluff. Alameddine knows exactly how to make your blood ache by creating dense portraits of human beings and the realities of living through the AIDS epidemic, as well as the Lebanese civil war. You will grieve heavily after reading this.

More...