Customer Reviews

The Boy from the Tower of the Moon

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I discovered this book by chance, and was so, so happy to have found it while reading it. I am Norwegian, but was born and raised in Lebanon, and recognize so many of the funny, sad, beautiful incidents Anwar Accawi describes. It's a wonderful book! And a loving tribute to Lebanon, the best place in the world - we were so lucky to grow up there in happy times!

Before World War II, life in the self-sufficient Lebanese farming village, Magdaluna (Tower of the Moon) was simple, shaped by the olive harvest and the summer procession of peddlers and gypsies. Everyone knew everyone, no one went hungry. There was no running water but the village well was pure and cold. People had no need of watches or calendars. After the war, change - Western technology - swept through the village.

When Civil War came in 1975, little remained to be bombed into rubble. Accawi's memoir recalls his childhood in this vanished place with a series of witty and poignant vignettes.

While faithful to the immediacy of a child's view, Accawi's stories are shaped by his adult perspective of humor and regret. Though he mourns the destruction of timeless village rhythms, the idyllic and the cruel frequently coexist in his stories, as if human life necessarily embodies both.

His first story, a joyful overview of childhood summer pleasures, culminates in a terrifying lesson for a boy not yet five. He learns that adults, even beloved family members, are "capable of doing anything - horrible things - and not seeing anything wrong with it. But the scariest thing about it was that they had the power..."

Radio was the first of the marvels to transform Magdaluna. Accawi's father brought it, returning from war. Flocking villagers, forced to be civil to one another under Grandma's roof, settle feuds, discover romance. But, alas, radios proliferate, people stay home, the convivial evenings end, new feuds arise.

Before the gramophone comes gathering people together again (but destroying the old evenings of folk dancing) and the telephone draws the men away from the companionable village madam, and the automobile scatters the village forever, Accawi introduces us to its characters.

His grandmother, illiterate and wise, tells him hard work can make him a mountain who needs no one's approval, "big and immovable, and people will have to deal with you." Though she had bags of feathers in her attic, she filled her parlor furniture with corn husks. "She was a one-eyed, no-nonsense Presbyterian with a frightful work ethic, and she did not want any of her visitors, including the red-nosed preacher she was sweet on, to get too comfortable and stay long."

His mother, also illiterate, was a tough survivor from the Turkish-Syrian border and a philosopher who always told the truth. Then there's Wadi, driven crazy by love; the unhurried shopkeeper who introduces Accawi to ice and operates the olive press; the traveling butcher; the mean lute player who grows beautiful roses; Abu George, the farrier, the best for miles around.

And every once in a while, something new comes along to shake things up. Each new technological machine brings delight to the child and it's only afterward, when he sees the effect on his village, the changes in the people he cherishes and the traditions that mean home to him, that dismay comes.

"But it is good, all of it, good; even the bad is good. Because of it I am what I am today."

Accawi draws us into his bygone world with love but without sentimentality. His vivid, well-crafted stories bring his isolated village to life with all its warts and wonders.

This book grabs you from the first page and takes you on a journey that sticks with you long after you have reading this incredible book.

Accawi has a masterful touch. He's profound yet clear. His story make you laugh out loud and break your heart all in the same paragrpah.

You can't go wrong with The Boy from the Tower of the Moon.

I cannot think of another book I've read with greater passion. Anwar Accawi possesses the ability to draw the reader into the mind of a five year old boy, and into the creative way its thinking process helps him understand the world around him. At the crossroads of change in the 1940s , the Mount Lebanon village of Majdalouna has very colorful and unique characters living at the fringe of what (then) modern life had to offer. The five year old Anwar untethers his mind to describe the village, villagers and their changing way of life.

About Anwar Accawi the author: another Mark Twain in the making? Possibly!

I read the Anwar Accawi essay "The Telephone" in the best American essays for 1998 edited by Cynthia Ozick. His writing is terrific. We need more new writers of his talent and the essay and information about other cultures will come alive again.