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Moving the Palace by [Charif Majdalani, Edward Gauvin]

Moving the Palace Kindle Edition

by Charif Majdalani (Author), Edward Gauvin (Translator) Format: Kindle Edition

4.1 24 ratings

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“A Middle Eastern heart-of-darkness tale that flows like a dream . . . Crackling with razor-sharp humor” (The New York Times).

At the dawn of the twentieth century, a young Lebanese explorer leaves the Levant for the wilds of Africa, encountering an eccentric English colonel in Sudan and enlisting in his service. In this lush chronicle of far-flung adventure, the military recruit crosses paths with a compatriot who has dismantled a sumptuous palace in Tripoli and is transporting it across the continent on a camel caravan. The protagonist soon takes charge of this hoard of architectural fragments, ferrying the dismantled landmark through Sudan, Egypt, and the Arabian Peninsula, attempting to return to his native Beirut with this moveable real estate. Along the way, he will encounter skeptic sheikhs, suspicious tribal leaders, bountiful feasts, pilgrims bound for Mecca, and T. E. Lawrence in a tent—in this “utterly charming” novel that was a recipient of the Académie Française’s François Mauriac Prize (Library Journal).

“Renders the complex social landscape of the Middle East and North Africa with subtlety and finesse . . . Yet one doesn’t need to care about the region’s history, or its present-day contexts, to enjoy Moving the Palace.” —The Wall Street Journal

Print length

188 pages
Language

English
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Publisher

New Vessel Press
Publication date

March 20, 2017
File size

5423 KB
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Editorial Reviews

Review

"This utterly charming and, yes, moving novel takes us on a journey ... and the result is a victory of human ingenuity and a joyous picaresque. VERDICT Beautiful fun that also gives a deeper sense of Middle East history."
—Library Journal

"Charif Majdalani has a ripping yarn to tell and tells it with a raconteur's bravura. Transporting, wholly engaging, deeply moving. This book is why I travel and why I read."
—Andrew McCarthy, award-winning director, actor, and author of Just Fly Away and The Longest Way Home

"Moving the Palace is an eloquent, captivating excursion through a Middle East history that is more relevant today than ever. Majdalani is a major storyteller and a novelist with conscience who writes the past with transnational awareness."
—Rawi Hage, author of De Niro's Game and Cockroach

"On one side the desert, infinite, immensely varied, splendid. On the other, the courage, obstinacy, folly, violence, and dreams of men. Through this fascinating adventure, Charif Majdalani constructs one of the most beautiful epics I've ever read."
—Antoine Volodine, author of Minor Angels and Naming the Jungle

"This novel provides entrée into the extraordinary fictional work of Charif Majdalani; with each book he lays out magnificent, terrible and true history through family genealogy, hopes and dramas. And each time Majdalani renews our vision."
—Patrick Deville, author of Plague and Cholera

“In language of extreme classicism—he is often compared to a Lebanese Proust—Majdalani imposes his rhythm, slow and mesmerizing, to bring us in step with his story … Throughout this epic tale he intimately weaves together the grand history of his country and his family, mixing fiction and reality in language of infinite sensuality.”
—L’Express

“An odyssey in the manner of The Thousand and One Nights.”
—Le Figaro littéraire

“An extraordinary book somewhere between adventure story, picaresque novel, fairytale and chronicle of a bygone era.”
—Neue Zürcher Zeitung

“Recounts the immense folly and excess of an explosive colonial episode—forgotten, deadly, torturous and involving weapons traffic and hidden treasures. Something that would have excited the adventurer Rimbaud had he survived his injuries …. Flaubert … would have loved this imaginary depiction of a real historical event.”
—Le Point

“The reader remains captivated long after having completed this epic and comic novel that allows one to perceive in the ineffable silence of the desert the attachment of a man to his homeland.”
—Le Monde

“Full of stirring epic images, trenchant anecdotes celebrating the virtues of movement … Majdalani has a way of merging time and place that makes his writing convey the concerns of men, their illusions, the sounds of the desert and the rhythm of marches and halts.”
—Le Matricule des Anges
"Renders the complex social landscape of the Middle East and North Africa with subtlety and finesse ... Yet one doesn’t need to care about the region’s history, or its present-day contexts, to enjoy 'Moving the Palace' ... brio and Mr. Majdalani’s richly textured prose are reason enough."
—The Wall Street Journal

“Charming and gently humorous … Majdalani’s writing sparkles … Those looking for an enjoyable and brisk literary adventure will be very satisfied.”
—Publishers Weekly

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.

Chapter One

This is a tale full of mounted cavalcades beneath great wind-tossed banners, of restless wanderings
and bloody anabases, he thinks, musing on what could be the first line of that book about his life he’ll never write, and then the click-clack of waterwheels on the canal distracts him; he straightens up in his wicker chair and leans back, savoring from the terrace where he’s sitting the silence that is a gift of the desert the desert spreads in its paradoxical munificence over the plantations, the dark masses of the plum trees, the apricot trees, the watermelon fields, and the cantaloupe fields, a silence that for millennia only the click-clack of waterwheels has marked with its slow, sharp cadence. And what I think is, there may not be apricot orchards or watermelon fields, but that most definitely is the desert there, in the background of the photo, the very old photo where he can be seen sitting in a wicker chair, cigar in hand, gazing pensively into the distance, in suspenders, one leg crossed over the other, with his tapering mustache and disheveled hair, the brow and chin that make him look like William Faulkner, one of the rare photos of him from that heroic era, which I imagine was taken in Khirbat al Harik, probably just after he’d come from Arabia, though in fact I’m not at all sure, and really, what can I be sure of, since apart from these few photos, everything about him from that time is a matter of myth or exaggeration or fancy? But if I am sure of nothing, then how should I go about telling his story; where shall I seek the Sultanate of Safa, vanished from the memory of men but still bound up with his own remembrances; how to imagine those cavalcades beneath wind-tossed banners, those Arabian tribes, and those palaces parading by on camelback; how to bring together and breathe life into all those outlandish, nonsensical particulars uncertain traditions have passed down, or vague stories my mother told me that he himself, her own father, told her, but which she never sought to have him clarify or secure to something tangible, such that they reached me in pieces, susceptible to wild reverie and endless novelistic embroidering, like a story of which only chapter headings remain, but which I have waited to tell for decades; and here I am, ready to do so, but halting, helpless, drifting into daydream as I imagine he drifted on the verandah of that plantation in Khirbat al Harik, watching flash past in memory that which I will never see, but which I shall be forced to invent?

Yet his story, at the start, hardly differs from those of any other Lebanese emigrants who, between 1880 and 1930, left their homeland to seek adventure, fame, or fortune in the world. If many of them met with success thanks to trade and commerce, there were some whose stories retained a more adventurous note, like those who braved the Orinoco to sell the goods of civilization to peoples unknown to the world, or those who were heroes of improbable odysseys in the far Siberian reaches during the civil wars in Russia. He was one of these, who came back at last with his eyes and head full of memories of escapades and follies. Tradition has it that he left Lebanon in 1908 or ’09. He could’ve headed for the U.S. or Brazil, as did most, or for Haiti or Guyana, as did the most courageous, or for Zanzibar, the Philippines, or Malabar, as did the most eccentric, those who dreamed of making fortunes trading in rare or never-before-seen wares. Instead, he chose the most thankless land known at the time, and headed for the Sudan. But back then, the Sudan proffered immense opportunities to a young Lebanese man who was Westernized, Anglophone, and Protestant to boot. And he was these three things, the child of an ancient family of Protestant poets and littérateurs originally Orthodox Christians from the Lebanese mountains, poets and littérateurs who, when the winds of revival wafted through Eastern philosophy, wrote treatises on the modernization of tropes in Arab poetry, whole divans of poems, and even an Arabic-English dictionary. Of his childhood, nothing is recorded; this much, however, is: at the age of eighteen he began his studies at the Syrian Protestant College in Beirut. After that, the ancient name he bore was not to open the doors to any career path other than scholarship, attended by some unremarkable post in the service of the Ottoman administration. This, it seemed, would not suffice him. Like the conquistadors who left a Europe that could no longer contain them, he left Lebanon one spring morning in 1908 or ’09, no doubt taking with him in a small suitcase a few shirts and handkerchiefs, and in his head a few delicate memories, the trees in the garden of the familial abode where a salt wind echoed the stately meter of the open sea, the aromas of jasmine and gardenia, the skies above Beirut vast and mild as a woman’s cheek and the liturgical whiteness of the snows on Mount Sannine.

In those inaugural years of the twentieth century, the Sudan has just been retaken by Anglo-Egyptian armies, who put an end to the Khalifa Abdallahi’s despotic regime, and returned the land to Egypt. Confusion still reigns, the country is only half under control, reconstruction on the ruined former capital has barely begun. But after decades of obscurantist tyranny, a new world is being born, and in the flood of men arriving to seize the still innumerable opportunities are a few from Lebanon: merchants, smugglers, artisans. But he is not one of these. The oldest accounts about the man who would become my grandfather report that he was a civilian officer in the Sudan, and it was in that capacity, no doubt, that he would live out the fantastical adventures attributed to him. Just as it reached Sudan, the British Army was in fact starting to recruit Anglophone Christian Arabs of Lebanese origin to act as liaisons with the local populace. Considered civilian officers, these intermediary agents were first assigned to the Egyptian Ministry of War in Cairo before being dispatched to their posts in Khartoum.

This means that at first—that is, the day he arrived in Khartoum—he had come from Cairo, after thirty hours of vile dust and soot tossed backward in black plumes by locomotives first of the Cairo-Luxor line, then the Luxor-Wadi Halfa, then the Wadi Halfa-Khartoum. Here he is, stepping off the train, covered in dust right up to the pockets of his white suit jacket, sand in his eyes and nostrils, the same amused air as in the photo I mentioned, with his trim mustache and his Faulknerian brow, though for all that with hair neatly combed and suitcase in hand. For a mallime, a massive Sudanese man in white robes sees to dusting him off with a great feather, after which a British officer politely waiting in the wings steps forward to ask, “Mr. Samuel Ayyad?” And like that he is taken in hand, conveyed to the barge that crosses the Blue Nile, then to Khartoum itself, and then, in a carriage, through the construction site that is the city to a white, new, unfinished villa where he must step over piles of brick and goatskins full of cement, getting his shoes all dusty again, but not with the usual brown dust, rather the white powdery dust of plaster. “One of these rooms will be your office from now on, sir,” explains the British officer. “You will share it with a colleague. The rest of the house will be yours.”

So everything starts off wonderfully, and we will continue in the same vein, imagining that the next morning the same officer takes him to Naoum Choucair, a Syro-Lebanese man of an older generation, advisor to the heads of the British army. And with him, the contract is clear. “You will have two months to familiarize yourself with the country,” says the old veteran, adventurer from the age of Khalifa Abdallahi. “You will receive reports from different districts, and you will write up a summary of them in English. That will be an excellent exercise to start off with.” We will say that they are in Choucair’s office in the buildings being restored in Gordon Pasha’s former palace. Of course the Nile can be glimpsed through the window, and when Choucair notices Samuel’s furtive glances at it, he drags him forward, declaring that this room is Gordon’s former office. He points out the Nile’s far bank, to the west, the train station where he disembarked the night before, then feluccas with their slanting masts on the river, then a seagull. Then there is a long silence punctuated by the din of laborers’ hammers and trowels as they work on renovating a palace façade, and Choucair starts talking again: “It will be an excellent exercise to start off with. You will be assigned the office in Kurdufan, a district where you will no doubt have to go.”

Samuel, who has returned to his wicker armchair, notices Choucair’s hesitation. He sees the hesitation of the man now seated sideways on a little sofa, elbow on the back, reads the question in his eyes, and anticipates its asking by nodding that yes, of course, he knows exactly where Kurdufan is. “At any rate,” says Choucair after this little silent exchange, “I’ll have a map of Sudan hung in your office.” He rises and heads for his desk, cluttered with books, manuscripts, letters, and strange instruments, spyglasses, portolans, even wooden statuettes he must have brought back long ago from the Bahr el Ghazal. He has probably occupied this office no more than a few months, but already he has layered it with the silt of a dozen years’ of travel across the land. He is of medium height, a bit tubby, with a graying beard, and the look of a great dreaming rover. What’s more, he keeps getting up and sitting back down again, and makes sweeping gestures as he speaks, without a care for the bottles of liqueur, statuettes, vases he is constantly in danger of toppling, as if he were more at ease in a pirogue on the Upper Nile or pitching on the back of a camel in the desert than confined by four walls. At that very moment he must be describing, perhaps by way of compensation, his famous and monumental History and Geography of Sudan. From amidst the disorder of his desk he plucks a cigar, offers Samuel one, and starts talking again, not in English now but Arabic, the Arabic of Lebanon; he claims to know well the Arabic-English Dictionary of Nassib Ayyad, Samuel’s father; he says this knowledge of languages is an asset (he says “our knowledge of languages,” and no doubt he means we Lebanese); he says the British need people who speak Arabic as well as they do English, and that proud as Baring and Kitchener are of their officers who speak Arabic, they speak like asses and understand even less, they learned it from The Thousand and One Nights, and he laughs. Samuel smiles, watching him with curiosity and without intervening, for from such men there is always much to learned.
--This text refers to an alternate kindle_edition edition.

Review

A Middle Eastern heart-of-darkness tale that flows like a dream, occasionally turning nightmarish, but is always rendered with a hypnotic quality beautifully captured in Edward Gauvin's elegant translation...Majdalani's novels are much praised in the Francophone world and with good reason. His seductive prose twists and turns, deftly matching hallucinatory content with form.

-- "New York Times Sunday Book Review"

An eloquent, captivating excursion through a Middle East history that is more relevant today than ever.

-- "Rawi Hage, author of De Niro's Game"

Charif Majdalani has a ripping yarn to tell and tells it with a raconteur's bravura. Transporting, wholly engaging, deeply moving. This book is why I travel and why I read.

-- "Andrew McCarthy, author of Just Fly Away "

Charming and gently humorous...Majdalani's writing sparkles...Those looking for an enjoyable and brisk literary adventure will be very satisfied.

-- "Publishers Weekly"

Renders the complex social landscape of the Middle East and North Africa with subtlety and finesse...Yet one doesn't need to care about the region's history, or its present-day contexts, to enjoy Moving the Palace...brio and Majdalani's richly textured prose are reason enough.

-- "Wall Street Journal"

The reader remains captivated long after having completed this epic and comic novel.

-- "Le Monde (Paris)"

This utterly charming and, yes, moving novel takes us on a journey...and the result is a victory of human ingenuity and a joyous picaresque...Beautiful fun that also gives a deeper sense of Middle East history.

-- "Library Journal"

Through this fascinating adventure, Charif Majdalani constructs one of the most beautiful epics I've ever read.

-- "Antoine Volodine, author of Minor Angels" --This text refers to an alternate kindle_edition edition.

About the Author

Charif Majdalani, born in Lebanon in 1960, is often compared to a Lebanese Proust. Majdalani lived in France from 1980 to 1993 and now teaches French literature at the Université Saint-Joseph in Beirut. The original French version of his novel Moving the Palace won the 2008 François Mauriac Prize from the Académie Française as well as the Prix Tropiques.

Edward Gauvin has received prizes and fellowships including those awarded by PEN America, the National Endowment for the Arts and the Fulbright program. His work has won the John Dryden Translation Prize and the Science Fiction & Fantasy Translation Award. He has translated over 200 graphic novels.
--This text refers to an alternate kindle_edition edition.

Review

"A Middle Eastern heart-of-darkness tale that flows like a dream, occasionally turning nightmarish, but is always rendered with a hypnotic quality beautifully captured in Edward Gauvin’s elegant translation ... Majdalani’s novels are much praised in the Francophone world, and with good reason. His seductive prose twists and turns, deftly matching hallucinatory content with form."—The New York Times Sunday Book Review

"Renders the complex social landscape of the Middle East and North Africa with subtlety and finesse ... Yet one doesn’t need to care about the region’s history, or its present-day contexts, to enjoy 'Moving the Palace' ... brio and Mr. Majdalani’s richly textured prose are reason enough."
—The Wall Street Journal

“Charming and gently humorous … Majdalani’s writing sparkles … Those looking for an enjoyable and brisk literary adventure will be very satisfied.”
—Publishers Weekly

“It is one of the novel’s pleasures that its story takes place against pivotal moments of the half-mythic history of northern Africa and the Middle East … Another reliable source of delight is Majdalani’s writing, constantly alive and entrancing in Edward Gauvin’s translation.”—World Literature Today

“This utterly charming and, yes, moving novel takes us on a journey … and the result is a victory of human ingenuity and a joyous picaresque. VERDICT Beautiful fun that also gives a deeper sense of Middle East history.”
—Library Journal

"Charif Majdalani has a ripping yarn to tell and tells it with a raconteur's bravura. Transporting, wholly engaging, deeply moving. This book is why I travel and why I read."
—Andrew McCarthy, award-winning director, actor, and author of Just Fly Away and The Longest Way Home

"This wildly entertaining novel ... leave[s] us with a renewed sense of wonder."—NC State University Center for Lebanese Diaspora Studies

"Moving the Palace is an eloquent, captivating excursion through a Middle East history that is more relevant today than ever. Majdalani is a major storyteller and a novelist with conscience who writes the past with transnational awareness."
—Rawi Hage, author of De Niro's Game and Cockroach

"On one side the desert, infinite, immensely varied, splendid. On the other, the courage, obstinacy, folly, violence, and dreams of men. Through this fascinating adventure, Charif Majdalani constructs one of the most beautiful epics I've ever read."
—Antoine Volodine, author of Minor Angels and Naming the Jungle

"This novel provides entrée into the extraordinary fictional work of Charif Majdalani; with each book he lays out magnificent, terrible and true history through family genealogy, hopes and dramas. And each time Majdalani renews our vision."
—Patrick Deville, author of Plague and Cholera

“In language of extreme classicism—he is often compared to a Lebanese Proust—Majdalani imposes his rhythm, slow and mesmerizing, to bring us in step with his story … Throughout this epic tale he intimately weaves together the grand history of his country and his family, mixing fiction and reality in language of infinite sensuality.”
—L’Express

“An odyssey in the manner of The Thousand and One Nights.”
—Le Figaro littéraire

“An extraordinary book somewhere between adventure story, picaresque novel, fairytale and chronicle of a bygone era.”
—Neue Zürcher Zeitung

“Recounts the immense folly and excess of an explosive colonial episode—forgotten, deadly, torturous and involving weapons traffic and hidden treasures. Something that would have excited the adventurer Rimbaud had he survived his injuries …. Flaubert … would have loved this imaginary depiction of a real historical event.”
—Le Point

“The reader remains captivated long after having completed this epic and comic novel that allows one to perceive in the ineffable silence of the desert the attachment of a man to his homeland.”
—Le Monde

“Full of stirring epic images, trenchant anecdotes celebrating the virtues of movement … Majdalani has a way of merging time and place that makes his writing convey the concerns of men, their illusions, the sounds of the desert and the rhythm of marches and halts.”
—Le Matricule des Anges --This text refers to an alternate kindle_edition edition.

Product details

ASIN ‏ : ‎ B06XQ695B8
Publisher ‏ : ‎ New Vessel Press; Translation edition (March 20, 2017)
Publication date ‏ : ‎ March 20, 2017
Language ‏ : ‎ English
File size ‏ : ‎ 5423 KB
Text-to-Speech ‏ : ‎ Enabled
Screen Reader ‏ : ‎ Supported
Enhanced typesetting ‏ : ‎ Enabled
X-Ray ‏ : ‎ Enabled
Word Wise ‏ : ‎ Enabled
Sticky notes ‏ : ‎ On Kindle Scribe
Print length ‏ : ‎ 188 pages

Best Sellers Rank: #1,297,515 in Kindle Store (See Top 100 in Kindle Store)
- #43 in Lebanon Travel Guides
- #174 in Historical Middle Eastern Fiction
- #433 in General Middle East Travel Guides

Customer Reviews:
4.1 24 ratings

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24 global ratings

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ThreeScorePlus

An Entertaining History Lesson

Reviewed in the United States 🇺🇸 on January 7, 2018

Verified Purchase

This is a sweeping, epic tale of a fascinating character told through the eyes of a great grandson who clearly admires his subject. There's a lot to be learned from this novel about the history of the Mideast and parts of Africa that the protagonist, an erudite Lebanese Christian who goes to work for the British Army, travels through on a series of often amusing exploits. The reach and influence of European Colonialism is laid out for the reader in a way that is not preachy or even overtly judgmental. However, I found myself at times wishing the book was a little less sweeping, covering less ground figuratively and literally and instead delving more deeply into some of the episodes. It is well-written, quick paced most of the time and entertaining.

One person found this helpful

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WIPSM

Excellent

Reviewed in the United States 🇺🇸 on October 6, 2021

Verified Purchase

Beautiful, lyrical, and captivating. An adventure, travelogue, love story, and window into pre-modern Arabian tribal culture rolled into one. A far fetched tale for sure, yet rendered utterly believable by magical prose which had me yearning for more. Great credit too to the translator from the original in French.

Helpful

Shoe City Girl

A glimpse at a little-known culture

Reviewed in the United States 🇺🇸 on July 18, 2017

Verified Purchase

I found the book charming at first, and the history of Lebanese and Syrians in Egypt was fascinating, but the ending was unsatisfying.

2 people found this helpful

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Too many racist comments about blacks

Reviewed in the United States 🇺🇸 on May 11, 2019

Verified Purchase

Entertaining but shot through with racist comments about blacks. This detracted from the pleasure of reading the book. Too bad.

2 people found this helpful

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harry furness

Great book

Reviewed in the United States 🇺🇸 on July 4, 2017

Verified Purchase

What a great story and even a better story teller. It shows how human we all are and that dreams and action make a life. I really enjoyed this book and hope that I can find other books by Mr. Majdalani.

2 people found this helpful

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Barton

Are you kidding me?

Reviewed in the United States 🇺🇸 on June 28, 2017

Verified Purchase

Rather unbelievable plot. Too much time developing too many characters that I had difficulty tracking.

One person found this helpful

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Jack Kruse

Kruse's Keys: Read 'Moving the Palace Slowly Because You Will Miss It

Reviewed in the United States 🇺🇸 on November 11, 2017

(This book arrived in the mail with high marks from my younger brother in Chicago. He'd gotten it from my grandmother in Seattle--a voracious reader of all things excellent).

Maidalani's Moving the Palace is one of the books that leaves you melancholy and blue because...it's over. It's over and your relationship with the protagonist is severed--forever buried forever in the pages of the novel.

In Moving the Palace's case, we learn the story of Samuel (through the recollection of his grandson)--an erudite Christian adventurer who leaves his homeland of Lebanon amidst the country's wave of great migration during the onset of the 20th century. Whereas many of his countrymen left for Europe, the Middle East and the United States, Samuel ventures down to the Sudan. During a stay in Tripoli, he encounters a small Arabian palace by the city citadel. Upon closer inspection, a plan hatches in Samuel's mind, a plan of what origin his grandson laments: "I do not know--nor will anyone, ever--what planted the seed of that incredible idea in his mind."

This plan, and its numerous iterations and evolutions, are the focus of the story. We follow Samuel as he disassembles the palace and loads it onto a caravan, descending into Africa with a dream to sell it off to a rich prince. Like any great tale, nothing goes as planned and Samuel's plan quickly unravels against the backdrop of the World War I.

Best of all, this story brought to mind a slew of other similarly striking novels which I've included before for your reading pleasure.

KEY QUOTES:

"But he is the kind of man to shoulder other people's whims, to make them his own, and here he is letting himself be swept along on Shafik's oddball odyssey."
"It must be remembered that Cairo at that time, though far from Europe, is the first city to rival Paris and Vienna for its soirees, the richness of its salons, and above all the power of its economic and financial elite."
"The inner circle belongs to dynasties that emigrated before the middle of the nineteenth century and built their fortunes in the first era of Egypt's modernization--like the Sakakini, Egypt's first manufacturers..., or the Soussas, builders of the Suez Canal and customs leaseholders at the port of Suez."
The last paragraph contains some of the more beautiful sentences that I've ever read. But I will leave that for you to discover.

KEY REFERENCES:

I put Moving the Palace in the same category as the two phenomenal stories below. This trio could be read in succession as kind of a 20th century adventurers look at Africa.
The Zanzibar Chest by Aiden Hartley
West With the Night by Beryl Markham
For different reasons, Moving the Palace brought to mind Mahfouz' masterpiece The Cairo Trilogy. Both stories draw the readers in and entangle them into the lives of the story's characters.

On Perception vs. Reality:
p. 59 Samuel leverages people's perception of him as they imagine a great authority than he actually possesses (i.e., "implementer of English policy"). There's also the idea of the value of items like gold as burdensome to the local chieftains who must worry about guarding it and transporting (versus something with more utility like camels, mules or slaves).

A description Samuel's nature:
p. 63 "But he is the kind of man to shoulder other people's whims, to make them his own, and here he is letting himself be swept along on Shafik's oddball odyssey."

Terms:
p. 90 zajals--form of Lebanese folk poetry, normally oral. "A zajal is written in two columns, which can be read separately per column and then across—the result is three poems in one, with bountiful repetition."

Zajal rabbit hole:
When Competitive Poetry Was Better Than Soccer
A Boy Remembers Zajal
On Adapting Zajal Poetry for Modern Times
A Modern English Zajal Poem
UNESCO on Zajal

p. 91 villeggiatura--a holiday in the countryside. In this case, Samuel thinks of this term as he enters the Shepheard's Hotel in Cairo.

Memory:
p. 90 The idea of preserving memories in couplets as Selim Atiyah does after a memorable evening.

For further research:
p. 05 author describes the 1880-1930 Lebanese emigration abroad. Syro-Lebanese Migration (1880-Present): “Push” and “Pull” Factors. In the story's case, the main character Samuel heads for the Sudan
p. 93 Nassib Ayyad (a fictional character it seems) is mentioned as a writer on the Arab poetry revival that occurred in concert wit the Arab cultural renaissance in the early 20th century. This rebirth is properly referred to as Al-Nahda (awakening). There's plenty on wikipedia for this but I hate to refer to that, so here are some links on the awakening:
A Question of Arab Unity
Contemporary Arab Thought: Cultural Critique in Comparative Perspective
p. 95 Cairo rivaling Paris in the early 20th century
Dissertation on Early 20th-century Cairo Coffeehouses Leads Penn Ph.D. Student to Egyptian and British Spy Reports
1882-Present Cairo
p. 95 Sakakini and Soussa dynasties: inner social circle in the early 20th century. These families emigrated to Egypt before the 1850s and built their wealth through Egypt's initial wave of modernization. Sakakinis were manufacturers and the Soussas were the Suez Canal builders.
Touring the Sakakini Palace

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Mary Campbell Gallagher, J.D., Ph.D.

For a delightful fable, read this book.

Reviewed in the United States 🇺🇸 on July 4, 2017

A delightful fable. A brilliant story teller.

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