The Disoriented, published in French in 2012 and at last in Frank Wynne’s assured English translation, is a profound reckoning…While the title alludes to being wrenched from the east, The Disoriented also signifies the universal loss of a moral compass.” —MAYA JAGGI, The Guardian
“A thoughtful novel about loss and identity.” —The Herald Magazine
“A thoughtful, philosophically rich story that probes a still-open wound.” —Kirkus Reviews
“Maalouf is a thoughtful, humane and passionate interlocutor.” —The New York Times Book Review
“Both analytic and allegorical” —The Wall Street Journal
“There are novels which reverberate long after you’ve finished reading them. Amin Maalouf’s The Disoriented is such a novel. This is a voyage between the Orient and the West, the past and the present, as only the 1993 Goncourt Prize winner knows how to write it.” —Le Figaro
“Maalouf writes intriguing novels of exceptional quality.” —NRC Handelsblad
“Amin Maalouf gives us a perfect look at the thoughts and feelings that can lead to emigration. One can only be impressed by the magnitude and the precision of his introspection.” —Le Monde des Livres
“Maalouf’s new book, The Disoriented, marks his return to the novel with fanfare. It is a very endearing book.” —Lire
“Maalouf makes a rare incursion into the twentieth century, and he evokes his native Lebanon in a state of war, a painful subject which until now he had only touched upon.”—Jeune Afrique
“The great virtue of this beautiful novel is that it concedes a human element to war, that it unravels the Lebanese carpet to undo its knots and loosen its strings.” —L’Express
“Amin Maalouf has an intact love of Lebanon inside him, as well as ever-enduring suffering and great nostalgia for his youth, of which he has perhaps never spoken of as well as he has in this novel.” —Page des Libraires
“Full of human warmth and told in an Oriental style, this is a sensitive reflection told through touching portraits.” —Notes Bibliographiques
“A great work, which explores the wounds of the exile and the compromises of those who stay.” —L’Amour des Livres
Praise for Leo Africanus
“Leo Africanus is a beautiful book of tales about people who are forced to accept choices made for them by someone else...It relates, poetically at times and often imaginatively, the story of those who did not make it to the New World.” —The New York Times
“Utterly fascinating.” —BBC World Service
Praise for The Garden of Light
"A fine meditative historical novel from the internationally acclaimed Lebanese author." —Kirkus Reviews
"Maalouf's Mani has the ring of life... [A] sad, glowing book."—The Washington Post
“...has the feel of a 1950's Hollywood epic, in which men gesture boldly and deliver words that deserve to be immediately carved in stone.” —The New York Times Book Review
Praise for In the Name of Identity
“Speaks from the depth of a powerful intellect.” —Times (London)
Praise for The Crusades Through Arab Eyes
"The Crusades Through Arab Eyes may be warmly recommended to lay-readers and students alike." —The Times Literary Supplement (London)
2020-02-10
An exile returns home to a land still torn apart by civil war 25 years afterward.
Think The Big Chill in Beirut with some of the sex but little of the lightheartedness in Jeune Afrique editor-in-chief Maalouf’s charged novel. Adam, whose name, he records in his overflowing notebooks, “encompasses all of nascent humanity, yet I belong to a humanity that is dying,” receives a phone call in Paris, where he has been living since leaving his native Lebanon in a time of conflict. His friend Mourad lies dying, Mourad’s wife tells Adam, and wants to see him before he dies. Adam is reluctant: We haven’t spoken for years, he protests. Nonetheless, he travels home to a place he barely recognizes. Just what drove the two friends apart emerges slowly, and as friends gather to commemorate Mourad’s passing, they wistfully remember a time when, as Adam recalls, “My friends belonged to all denominations and each made it a duty, a point of pride, to mock his own—and then, gently, those of the others.” The gentleness is long past, as an Arab jihadi pointedly tells Adam. For his part, Adam, a historian who is years overdue delivering a commissioned biography of Attila, admits to knowing more about Caesar and Hannibal than about his own circle. He begins to chase down the details of their lives—but, as his partner in Paris chides, “I know you, Adam. You’ll fill hundreds of pages with stories of your friends, but it will all end up mouldering in a drawer.” Those stories are inevitably ones of dreams dashed and new realities substituted for them: a woman with whom he has a fitful affair wanted to become a surgeon but instead winds up as what Adam calls a “chatelaine,” that is, a hotel manager; another, a man of the world, withdraws to a monastery; a third, whose “long curly hair was more white than gray” now, has moved across the world to Brazil; and so on. None is particularly happy—and the story, fittingly, ends on a tragic, uncertain note.
A thoughtful, philosophically rich story that probes a still-open wound.
