A Masquerade for the Dead

Description

“I’m afraid. I’m afraid of this visit to Beirut. Afraid of a city whose language I speak but don’t truly speak, a city I haven’t visited for thirteen years, since I was a boy on the cusp of adolescence, deliberately born into the Lebanese war a year after my first cry in this savage world. I’ve only ever seen Beirut on French television as a stage for fires, battles, hostages, death, and the glorification of death. I’m afraid of the prophecy that blankets Paris airport and prevents planes from taking off; perhaps because the plane to Beirut is made of fog… and its fate is made of fog, and my whole head is made of fog. Perhaps the fog is now flowing from my eyes, my ears, my nostrils, my mouth, and my clothes, and perhaps I am a man of fog.” Fawaz stared at Dana’s face. She smiled at him with a gentle warmth. He was reassured, realizing that she couldn’t see the fog that seeped from his soul through the cracks in his body, and that he didn’t know she was fog, like everything visible today, all memories, and perhaps all of the future. So my calm masquerade hadn’t fallen from my face… On the other hand, perhaps it would have been better for me to stitch my wound open. After another, and confessing my fear to myself.” The worries and anxieties of Lebanon reside in the heart of one who has tasted the bitterness of its events, who left its land fearing for his life, yet his heart remains planted there. Upon his return after some time, accompanied by others, the novelist embarks on a journey to evoke events teeming with the rhythm of Lebanese social, political, and economic life, through which images of life are formed in all its contradictions, its flaws and its virtues, its joy and its sorrow, its light and its darkness, its humanity and its diabolical nature. A novel, a writer, and a deceptively simple style that elevates the literary work to the heights of creativity.