Les désorientés by Amin Maalouf (review)

Reviews 211 Maalouf, Amin. Les désorientés. Paris: Grasset, 2012. ISBN 978-2-246-77271-2. Pp. 520. 22 a. War can alienate the best of well-intentioned friends, especially when one leaves their feuding country and the other remains. Herein, the Lebanese civil war in the early 1970s caused Adam to emigrate from his native land to Paris where he became a distinguished professor. He left twenty years ago.Adam is a scholar currently writing a biography of Attila the Hun. At forty-seven years old he is ‘disoriented’ by having left his homeland, understood to be part of the Orient. This tale is told with Adam’s memoirs linked by a narrator’s comments providing context for Adam’s writings. Unexpectedly , Mourad, an estranged friend from Adam’s university days, requests Adam’s presence at his deathbed in Adam’s native city. Adam decides to return and settle accounts with Mourad who dies before he can reach him. Mourad’s wife Tania would like to host a reunion of the friends forty days after Mourad’s death.Adam stays in his native country to contact the friends, advise them of Mourad’s passing, and invite them to the memorial service. Letters from Adam’s friends document their takes on his friendship with Mourad who was a generous host to the group of ten university friends. They called themselves“le Cercle des Byzantins”(367). The war separated the Byzantines in various ways that keep the story’s peripety engaging with an elegant style that searches for Adam’s origins“dans l’ordre des choses”(67). He maintains that his was“un choix existentiel”(69) to leave his homeland despite Mourad’s objections that Adam thus abandoned his country and his friends to settle in Paris. Their common friend Albert morally supported Adam’s departure, then attempted suicide, and eventually expatriated to the United States. There is also Sémiramis, a woman friend from the same group whose friendship is rekindled during Adam’s return. Her fiancé Bilal was killed in action when he joined an armed faction in the civil war.While most of the Byzantines left the country during the heady days of civil war, Mourad stayed and eventually was a government Minister during the war. He also became wealthy by taking advantage of the insurgents’ interests. After Mourad’s funeral, the other Byzantines now agree to return to Mourad’s terrace where they were so welcome during their university years. Returning to their Levantine homeland proves to be as difficult a voyage for many of the emigrated Byzantines as was their original odyssey in leaving. Adam is not the lone sufferer. Combining various religions and nationalities , the friends were also torn both by leaving and returning from their twenty-year absences. Adam finally discovers that there is much irony in his name for, like many of his friends,he began again somewhere else without ever acknowledging that his roots are part of that identity he sought elsewhere. This story is an intriguing narrative about being a stranger and the limitations that condition imposes on friends as they age and change into what they were not according to the original terms of their friendship. Trinity University (TX) Roland A. Champagne ...