Bjorn
15-Apr-2010, 09:36
V?nus Khoury-Ghata, A House At The Tearside (Une maison au bord des larmes), 1998
There's a tendency in the non-European literature that gets imported and translated to deal with the issues that Europeans are familiar with from that country. African books must deal with post-colonialism, starvation and civil war, South American books must deal with corruption and dictatorship, Japanese books must deal with either war, technology or monsters, and Lebanese books obviously deal with the civil war. Not that those aren't things that must be dealt with in fiction, but surely that's not all that happens out there?
That said, Khoury-Ghata has lived in France since the 70s, writes in French, and historically speaking it's a bit odd that Lebanon is considered non-European anyway.
A House At The Tearside is, despite the way the civil war sneaks in - more as a Fortinbras-style plot device - towards the end, mostly one of those novels that's not about the Big Political Things but rather a small, and yet so huge, family drama. Her own, in fact. Starting in the early 50s, it deals with her parents and her brother. Her father had broken with tradition in his youth, refused his calling to be a priest and run away; now he's stuck with a teenage son who wears black, only wants to speak French, takes drugs, writes strange poetry and demands that people address him as "Rimbaud." And he hates cedar trees. Clearly, this is a curse. And if that sounds funny, it's really not; the whole thing descends into tragedy, both for the author's family and the others around them. Drug use, mental illness, family honour that must be maintained, etc.
Khoury-Ghata's language, and the largely unspoken connections between the various characters, is both the reason to read the book and the problem with it. Her prose is beautifully detailed, the slightly clich?d "poetic", alternating between first, third and (in the letters directly to her increasingly ill brother) second person as the story moves along. At its best, it paints a heartbreaking picture of a family where nobody can quite point out what went wrong, only that it can never be made right again (and we're back to the civil war, aren't we?) But at the same time, it feels a little too private - not only in the sense of this being more a book for her own sake than for anyone who wasn't there, but also in that she doesn't tell us everything; much of the book reads like a letter directly to someone who can no longer read it, but where she still assumes that he knows their backstory in a way the reader can't. We're stuck feeling what she feels without quite understanding why. Whether that's a good thing is a matter of taste, I guess.
***00
There's a tendency in the non-European literature that gets imported and translated to deal with the issues that Europeans are familiar with from that country. African books must deal with post-colonialism, starvation and civil war, South American books must deal with corruption and dictatorship, Japanese books must deal with either war, technology or monsters, and Lebanese books obviously deal with the civil war. Not that those aren't things that must be dealt with in fiction, but surely that's not all that happens out there?
That said, Khoury-Ghata has lived in France since the 70s, writes in French, and historically speaking it's a bit odd that Lebanon is considered non-European anyway.
A House At The Tearside is, despite the way the civil war sneaks in - more as a Fortinbras-style plot device - towards the end, mostly one of those novels that's not about the Big Political Things but rather a small, and yet so huge, family drama. Her own, in fact. Starting in the early 50s, it deals with her parents and her brother. Her father had broken with tradition in his youth, refused his calling to be a priest and run away; now he's stuck with a teenage son who wears black, only wants to speak French, takes drugs, writes strange poetry and demands that people address him as "Rimbaud." And he hates cedar trees. Clearly, this is a curse. And if that sounds funny, it's really not; the whole thing descends into tragedy, both for the author's family and the others around them. Drug use, mental illness, family honour that must be maintained, etc.
Khoury-Ghata's language, and the largely unspoken connections between the various characters, is both the reason to read the book and the problem with it. Her prose is beautifully detailed, the slightly clich?d "poetic", alternating between first, third and (in the letters directly to her increasingly ill brother) second person as the story moves along. At its best, it paints a heartbreaking picture of a family where nobody can quite point out what went wrong, only that it can never be made right again (and we're back to the civil war, aren't we?) But at the same time, it feels a little too private - not only in the sense of this being more a book for her own sake than for anyone who wasn't there, but also in that she doesn't tell us everything; much of the book reads like a letter directly to someone who can no longer read it, but where she still assumes that he knows their backstory in a way the reader can't. We're stuck feeling what she feels without quite understanding why. Whether that's a good thing is a matter of taste, I guess.
***00