The Lebanese-born French author offers a pensive, lyrical meditation on a dying world…A Camus for our time, Maalouf urges that civilization is ‘fragile, shimmering, evanescent’—and perhaps doomed.” —Kirkus Reviews, *Starred Review*
“Adrift is an insightful and profoundly disturbing interpretation of recent world history—and our uncertain future.” —The Guardian
“In a year of pandemic, social breakdown, race riots and, for those in Beirut, exploding ammonium nitrate, you do not have to be a perpetual doomsayer to politely disagree. Now writers do not ask for whom the bell tolls, they simply assume it tolls for everyone and focus on the question: why? One worthy stab at an answer comes from a source underappreciated in Britain—Amin Maalouf, a thinker with a novelist’s imagination and a fine understanding of the broad sweep of history…Maalouf does not offer a clear solution other than the obvious; that we should listen to each other more. He does not preach, and perhaps therein lies our only way forwards to tackle our shared future with the grace and understatement that is the hallmark of his own writing.” —The Times
“Stunning…Adrift: How Our World Lost Its Way traces modern events that have resulted in severe geopolitical breakdown, leaving the world ‘utterly incapable of marshalling the solidarity necessary to deal with a threat of this magnitude’—the climate emergency.” —Globe and Mail
“Adrift is so movingly written and so all-encompassing that it would behoove all intelligent humans, and those who are aiming to understand the connections between seemingly disconnected events, to get this book, read it, absorb it and reflect on the ideas the author puts forward about the collapse of civilizations, the decline of civility and the nature of empires.” —New York Journal of Books
“An unavoidably personal and sometimes contentious account, it’s born of a post-War liberal worldview which has been unfashionable for some time but still holds much of value.” —The Herald Scotland
“Maalouf takes a long, often bleak look at a fragile world that feels in acute danger of breaking further apart, and at a fissiparous era where rage and impotence often seem to divide us more comprehensively than ever…it illuminates the puzzle of how a world that once seemed to be on a path towards progress, thanks to technology and scientific and medical advances, again risks being torn apart by the human forces.” —Caroline Wyatt, European Literature Network
“Sharp intellect, tender heart. Maalouf is not only a brilliant storyteller and a wise thinker, he is one of our last remaining bridge builders between cultures, nations, tribes.” —Elif Shafak
“Across an impressive body of work, Mr. Maalouf has mapped out the points of rupture and convergence between Europe and the Arab World. In Adrift, using his own intellectual and political autobiography, he traces several of the turning points that have helped shape both his personal life and our world today. The lucid elegance of his analysis of complex and often chaotic events, is the paradox of this book and is among the many gifts of its gentle, learned and inquisitive author.” —Hisham Matar
“Magnificent, a book of sorrows for our times, a provocative and powerful elegy by one of the world’s great writers.” — Philippe Sands, President of English PEN
“With Adrift, Amin Maalouf again displays his supreme mastery in presenting the complexities of identity, history, and politics. A great observer of the human condition, and himself a product of multiple cultures, Maalouf offers a penetrating and personal account of the troubled state of our planet and its peoples. No book is more evocative at capturing the richness of our cultures but also their fragility and the dangers that menace us all today.” —Bernard Haykel, Professor of Near Eastern Studies, Princeton University
“Adrift is both an elegy for the Levant in which he grew up, and a reflection on the violent fragmentation and political malaise of globalised capitalism. In Maalouf’s portrait, the world in which Covid-19 made its calamitous appearance is disoriented and dangerously unequal, fragmented into identity-based groups, at war with one another yet all beholden to the market...” — The London Review of Books
“The writer and scholar delves back into his own history to analyze the tragic consequences of the shock prophesied by Samuel Huntington.”— Le Figaro Magazine
“With his consciously nurtured multiple identity, Maalouf is just the sort of interlocutor this period needs. He reaches deep into unmined seams of cultural history, scything elegantly through cliché and conventional models of received wisdom.” — Financial Times, on Disordered World
“A marvelous, luminous piece of writing...The title is powerful, the book equally so. A marvelous, luminous piece of writing—you should read Adrift.” — Europe 1
“True change is possible: Maalouf shows us possible ways forward in magnificent prose filled with wisdom.” — La Provence
“Wonderful and terrifying.” — La Grande Librairie - France 5
“A powerful voice.” — France Culture
“Over rupture and conflict, Amin Maalouf has always preferred epics of encounters, beginnings, and connections.” — Le Point
“An alarming report on the state of the world.” — Le Soir
★ 2020-06-30
The Lebanese-born French author offers a pensive, lyrical meditation on a dying world.
The author of brilliant novels and books of essays such as Disordered World, Maalouf announces his theme at the outset: “I was born hale and healthy into the arms of a dying civilization, and I have spent my whole life feeling that I am surviving, with no credit or blame, when around me so many things were falling into ruin.” At first, he means the vanished civilization of the Levant, where Christians, Jews, and Arabs once lived together but that has since collapsed in ethnocidal battles and sectarian wars. “The Levantine ideal,” writes Maalouf, “as my people experienced it, as I have always wanted to live it, demands that each person assume full responsibility for his own, and a little responsibility for others.” No more. Born in Beirut in 1949, a Maronite Christian, Maalouf lived in the Egypt of Gamal Abdel Nasser, “the last colossus of the Arab world,” who ultimately failed in his mission to unite it; in adulthood, Maalouf moved to Paris, where he has lived for decades. Egypt, he writes, “was doomed to crumble,” while Lebanon’s ecumenicalism gave way to narrow self-interest and appeals to outsiders of one’s own ethnicity for support—Arabs calling for Arabs and Jews for Jews, which Maalouf likens to various Swiss cantons calling on their German, French, and Italian neighbors for intercession, which would spell doom for the Swiss Confederation. The analogy is apposite, for the rest of the world is also suffering collapse. “In the era in which we live,” writes the author, “despair can sweep across oceans, scale walls, cross any frontier, physical or mental, and it is not easily contained.” Ideals of democracy, citizenship, environmental health, world peace, and the like now fall before nationalism, authoritarianism, and the decline of private life in the Orwellian present.
A Camus for our time, Maalouf urges that civilization is “fragile, shimmering, evanescent”—and perhaps doomed.
