Origins: a memoir

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 Maalouf's paternal grandfather, Boutros Maalouf.

Maalouf sets out to discover the truth about why Boutros, a poet and educator in Lebanon, traveled across the globe to rescue his younger brother, Gabrayel, who had settled in Havana. What follows is the gripping excavation of a family's 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 story's central thread: his quest to lift the shadow of legend from his family's past.

Origins is at once a gripping family chronicle and a timely consideration of Lebanese culture and politics.
Descrição do Livro
‘We are, and always will be, wanderers who have lost their way . . .’ A prolific novelist and acclaimed historian of the Middle East, Amin Maalouf had never before taken the time to trace his own ancestry. But on the sudden death of his father he decides to address this, and, given a trunk of letters and the opportunity to sort them, begins to find the keys to his past. Like many Levantine families, Maalouf’s is ethnically and religiously diverse, and the figures he encounters are maverick, visionary, strong-willed, far-flung. Starting in the mountains of Lebanon, their story is yet one of exile: of brothers separated, of dramatic emigrations, and of revolutions espoused in the dying years of the Ottoman Empire and beyond. Taking Maalouf from Lebanon to Cuba, this memoir is a fascinating insight into the nature and fate of a nomadic family. Above all, it is a meditation on the profound extent to which blood ties can represent homeland, and to which curiosity, guilt, love and pride can echo through the generations. 'What do you get when one of the Arab world's greatest writers, a Prix-Goncourt-winning historical novelist, decides to write a memoir? A marvel' Rabih Alameddine

Biografia, Autobiografia, Memórias