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Book Review: Anthony Shadid's House of Stone

House_of_Stone186x140.jpgThis is the second in a series of reviews of new books on Middle Eastern affairs. We asked Dr. Gail Weigl, an APN volunteer and a professor of art history, to review the late Anthony Shadid's book on his Southern Lebanese family roots. Following is Gail's review.

Anthony Shadid, House of Stone: A Memoir of Home, Family, and a Lost Middle East (Boston and New York: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2012), $26.00

This haunting memoir, deeply poignant in its own right, is made yet more poignant by the untimely death of its author, the two-time Pulitzer Prize winning Middle East correspondent for The New York Times, Anthony Shadid.
 
His death alone makes it a difficult book to objectively review. The difficulty is compounded, however, by the uniformly glowing reviews by Shadid's colleagues and admirers. Each references the personal circumstances that led Shadid to the quixotic project at the heart of the book, though by no means its sole preoccupation: the rebuilding of his maternal great grandfather Isber Samara's house in the now moribund but once flourishing town of Marjayoun, Lebanon.  

Disillusioned and exhausted by his experiences reporting on the war in Iraq, and by the breakdown of his marriage, what better ambition than to rebuild, despite the odds, that which has been lost?

Shadid's is the universal lament of the exile, stated at the outset and informing the memoir throughout:  "it's not just the others who have been left behind; it is all of you that is known." And this "all of you" is recalled and honored in brief narratives of Lebanon's history of colonization, occupation, and civil war, interwoven with the history of his family's losses.

In Shadid's hands, the personal becomes a national lament, as if the restoration of the house was akin to restoring the lost world of the Levant, of a society long vanished, of a landscape of olives and pomegranates reduced to the dimensions of a private garden.  

Shadid also shows an intense sensitivity to nature, used throughout to describe Lebanon as a paradise garden, as well as a source of promise as the house takes shape, amid friendships fragile and slowly forged.  

Among the most memorable of a cast of characters rendered immediate and alive by Shadid's gift for observation is Dr. Khairalla, an upright man accused of having collaborated with the Israelis, now dying of cancer, who becomes the author's mentor for reclaiming his great-grandmother Bahija's garden. Briefer sketches of characters enliven the narrative as a whole, as in this flawless image of the landlord, Michael Fardisi, who "resembled a bandleader with unsavory associations," or of Abu Jassim, curly- haired, stocky, with a smile that suggested grief, whose ten words of English were "constantly rearranged and delivered in nonsensical combinations."

Paralleling the author's skill at defining a personality and context is his ability to encompass an entire culture--past, present, future--in terms of human relationships and idiosyncrasies. The idiosyncratic, or at least that which would appear so to the American reader, is unremarkable, and again evokes the history of Marjayoun. To take but one example, the "loquacious even if miserable Shibil," who spends sleepless nights sorting through "piles of grudges, imagined slights, and never-ending quarrels"  is full of expletives and disgust at the politics of Lebanon; steeped in the culture and traditions of the town,  his anger at its demise and that of his family confirms the culture of Marjayoun, of Lebanon, of the Middle East.

Later, we see the brilliant if at times confusing intermingling of histories personal, national, and international that characterizes the memoir, as Shadid recalls the baptism of Hikmat's daughter.  Here Lebanon, America, Antiquity, Syria and Iraq are all of a piece.  As Shadid recreates his great-grandmother's life in the house, his mind inexorably is led to the family's story in America, then loops back again to the tragedy of Lebanon.  

At times, this effort to unite his present, his family's past and the history of Lebanon is unsettling, as the reader struggles to find continuity amidst change (perhaps a metaphor for Middle Eastern history?).

It is most successful as the narrative reaches into the Samara family saga in Oklahoma, as Shadid traces his grandmother Raeefa's journey from adored young daughter exiled to  America unasked, ignorant of the difficulties and loneliness she would face, to matriarch of a successful family of merchants; often it is especially deft, as when Shadid muses on the patterns of tiles newly laid in the house of stone: "As the spring rains fell, I returned to the past, walking across designs that were whispers of a culture now gone.  The patterns were a miscellany of lives I never knew.  The survivors of so many cataclysms were in the resilient colors, or in the gullies and outcroppings running through the tiles that mapped the geography of another epoch.  They were footnotes of what we had lost."

Not only the French, but the English, the Ottomans, the Lebanese, and especially the Israelis figure prominently in the destruction of Isber's home. The memoir opens with the 2006 Israeli occupation, and what is to become a pattern in the book of references to the brutality of the Israeli army. As the ever-grim Shibil observes, "You're still in a big habis, a big prison, but when the Jews were here, we lived better."

If Shadid seems to focus on  Israeli brutality in the region, it is perhaps because the Israeli occupation, capture of the Golan, atrocities of  Sabra and Shatila, and other instances of Hezbollah's notion of "Israel's scheme in Lebanon"  happened in real time. He does, after all, find a half-exploded Israeli rocket embedded in the second story when he first comes upon Isber's house. In fairness, he traces without prejudice the violations experienced through history by this sad country, including and especially those of Lebanon itself.

Of course, the centerpiece of the book is the rebuilding of Isber's house, and in passages devoted to the Lebanese builders and craftsmen engaged--or not--in the project, the beauty, clarity and precision of Shadid's writing shines. Both the hilarity and frustration of working on the house emerges as a lesson in cultural understanding--or not.

Perhaps more to the point, House of Stone is an essay in understanding Arabic culture and language.

Most enlightening for Western readers with little empathy for or knowledge of the differences between Arabic and European world-views is the general tone, as Shadid recounts the lessons learned during his year-long effort to understand both friends and workers.  The definitions of Arabic terms and the descriptions of personal interactions coalesce into a sense of place only slowly penetrated, and once penetrated, if not quite familiar, still never again entirely alien. Food and drink, business and pleasure animate his Lebanese adventure, and perhaps if more people attempted what Anthony Shadid did, some measure of understanding would come to the Middle East.

Whatever our sympathies, be they Lebanese, Palestinian, or Israeli, one cannot fail to experience the painful severing of ties he so tenderly describes. From the wrenching loss of home experienced by those exiles who set out for America, to the unalterably lost connections--topographic and human, spiritual and intellectual, historical and contemporary--forced by war and occupation, the reader cannot escape the tragedy of a heritage destroyed.  

This is the crux of Shadid's memoir, not the restoration of his great-grandfather's house, but the restoration of a family's history embedded in a place to which it no longer belongs, a place, moreover, which no longer exists.