Christy LefteriThe Beekeeper of Aleppo (review)

as de Sola keeps faith with many aspects of poetry’s great tradition, she’s also, in an unshowy way, an original. Daniel Brown Baldwin, New York Christy Lefteri The Beekeeper of Aleppo New York. Ballantine. 2019. 317 pages. ORIGINALLY PUBLISHED in Canada in 2016, The Beekeeper of Aleppo follows a couple fleeing the destruction of the Syrian war to Turkey and Greece as they journey toward their remaining family in Britain. Captivating from the very first page, the book couldn’t be more timely. A rich, gentle voice and beautiful imagery combine almost ironically with individual and systemic atrocities to convey the absolute devastation of war. The book has a dreamlike quality: certain sections are clear and concrete while others are more nebulous, and the plotline moves in time and space as a dream does, or as memories do for trauma victims. The symbolism of bees in the book is masterful. Bees are socially dependent creatures that often represent the life and health of their ecosystem. Small and fragile yet tenacious beyond belief, they can easily be seen as kindred souls to Nuri and Afra, the main characters in the novel. When nothing remains for them in Aleppo, Nuri longs to be reunited with his cousin and apiary partner in Britain. His wife, Afra, has sustained almost more damage than one individual can survive. It would be cliché to simply say that they need each other to survive the journey to a new life; the book goes much further, into the angst and grief that surround them as they cling, alternately at times, to the bond that has been deeply forged by shared pain. The author herself is the daughter of Cypriot refugees and brings a compassionate eye to the inter- and intrapersonal effects of loss and displacement. Lefteri has done more than tell the story of Syrian refugees; she has given flesh and blood to the many instances of political unrest that we see daily on our screens. Her studies in the field of psychotherapy and her work at a UNICEF center for refugees in Greece give her a deft hand and show a genuine heart. She has created an opportunity for readers to become more human in their understanding of current events and the acute suffering that accompanies them. Joy Walsh Butler, Pennsylvania Books in Review Pierre Chappuis A Notebook of Clouds Trans. John Taylor John Taylor A Notebook of Ridges Les Brouzils, France. The Fortnightly Review. 2019. 160 pages. A UNIQUELY VALUED genre in French letters is the cahier or carnet (notebook or journal). These collections are often like commonplace books and usually include not just pieces in verse form and prose texts but “notes, fragments , quotations, wordplay, and even meteorological facts” (to quote John Taylor) plus a host of other kinds of seemingly incidental writings including aphorisms, diary entries, and just random jottings. Taylor, the author of one of the cahiers under review and the translator of the other, is also one of our most astute critics of contemporary French letters as well as the translator of Pierre-Albert Jourdan, arguably one of the two best writers in this genre. The other, Philippe Jaccottet, succinctly identifies the premise behind this kind of writing in his axiom “Glance, do not aim.” There is an inherent paradox in the cahier genre itself, identified by Chappuis in what his editor/translator here calls “A Preliminary Sketch.” This “sketch” precedes chronologically the cahier proper entitled A Notebook of Clouds, a composition that, the sketch speculates, “would presuppose a more or less incoherent sequence, a jumble of notes, spontaneous jottings: but some pieces have taken form.” The forms taken may be verse or obviously restructured “poetic” prose. The “confrontation of the two kinds of writing [creates] . . . similarities and divergences, parallels, as they overtake each other, ‘pursue’ each other.” This tension is what both the writer and reader of the cahier genre need to embrace. Taylor’s interpretive suggestion: “The book forms a whole that must be read as such.” Perhaps. My own experience reading such “books” is that they are all entries in search of a whole, one that the reader, as often as not, needs to supply. By now...