Michael Henderson suggests

Email registration

Free weekly email update

Great products and special offers for Spectator readers

Click here for great value events

Click here for exclusive articles, offers, tasting notes and discussion

Origins: A Memoir

Great expectations dashed

Amin Maalouf, translated by Catherine Temerson
Picador, 404pp, £16.99,

James Buchan

Wednesday, 15th October 2008

Origins: A Memoir, by Amin Maalouf, translated by Catherine Temerson

The Lebanese Amin Maalouf is best known as a writer of historical novels in French, such as Le Rocher de Tanios, which won the Prix Goncourt in 1993. Yet before moving to Paris during the Lebanese civil war of the mid-1970s, Maalouf was a newspaper journalist in Beirut like his father before him. These two elements in his character, romancier and reporter, come together in this fine essay in family history.

First published in French by Grasset as Origines in 2004, it is based on a trunk of family letters, photographs, newspaper clippings, receipts and title deeds preserved by the author’s mother in the family house in a part of Mount Lebanon known as the Northern Metn. In piecing together these documents, and quizzing old and far-flung relations, Maalouf casts a clear, provincial sidelight on certain important processes of the early-20th-century Levant: the death throes of the Ottoman empire, the emigrations of Syrians and Lebanese to the Americas and Australia, the Great War, the rise of Arab and Turkish nationalism and the French mandate over Syria and Lebanon.

The Maaloufs of 100 years ago are a fractious and affectionate mish-mash of Greek Catholics, Maronites, Freemasons, freethinkers and, under the influence of the admirable American missionaries of that place and era, Presbyterians. Amin makes a study in contrasts between his grandfather, Botros (sometimes Peter or Pierre), and his younger brother, Gebrayel (or Gabriel). While the poet and teacher, Botros, stays at home, determined to lift the country now known as Lebanon out of its oriental torpor, the energetic Gebrayel emigrates in 1895, first to the United States and then Cuba, where he sets up a successful department store in Havana, La Verdad.