Confessions

March 21, 2016
One day in 1976, Maroun, the narrator of this moving short novel from Lebanese author Jaber, is shot and wounded on the demarcation line that divides Beirut. A small child at the time, Maroun loses one family but gains another. "My father used to kidnap people and kill them," Maroun says in the arresting opening sentence about the man who adopts him. This new father has been committing these crimes ever since the murder of his little boy, whose bloody corpse with its tattered clothes was "dumped on the road between the Museum and the Hôtel-Dieu." Maroun grows up in a Beirut where war is almost a constant between 1976 and 1990. His untrustworthy memory and his place in his new family are ever-present concerns in a tortured tale that reveals the amazing ability of people to carve normality out of the most extreme and brutal conditions. Jaber sketches many memorable characters, none more unforgettable than his forever unsettled narrator.

January 15, 2016
A young boy is adopted by the man who gunned down his family in this searing novel about the Lebanese civil war. Maroun was 4 or 5 years old when his family's car was stopped at the demarcation line dividing East and West Beirut. The men who stopped the car opened fire, and the boy was the only survivor. All of this is recounted within the first 20 pages of the new novel by Jaber (The Mehlis Report, 2013, etc.), winner of the International Prize for Arabic Fiction. It's what happens next that consumes the bulk of this slim volume. Maroun was adopted by one of those men who had recently lost a son of the same age to the wartime violence. Now a young man, Maroun has only just discovered the truth about his origins, which his brother confesses to him while they wait for their father to endure surgery. Maroun had grown up as one of the family's own. Over the years, he'd noticed the strange looks that his mother and sisters would periodically give him, but that had been the extent of his knowledge. Now, he retraces his early memories and suspicions in an attempt to come to terms with his own identity. He's desperate to parse his actual childhood from an imagined one. After describing one early memory, he asks, "Am I remembering it or imagining it? And how can I tell the difference? Memory's a massive reservoir, it's a deep well, it's got layers upon layers upon layers--what does it bury, and what doesn't it?" Jaber's narrative follows the obsessive circuit of Maroun's thoughts, which is circular and repetitive, doubling back on itself out of doubt and uncertainty. Still, "I'm trying," he says, "to the best of my ability, to stick to a logical order. It's important to have some command over the order of things: that's important." Maroun's voice has the compulsive urgency of someone who has long kept silent and cannot stop speaking now that he has finally begun. He's hyperarticulate in a panicked sort of way, but this turns out to be unfortunate, since it obscures other, more delicate questions. Did he blame his father for what he'd done? Did he blame his siblings, his mother? As brave and as brutal as Jaber's novel is, it somehow fails to comprehend the scope of its own magnitude. A novel that explores questions of identity, memory, and blame and leaves many of those questions unanswered.

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June 15, 2016

In this spare, intense volume, winner of the International Prize for Arabic Fiction, Lebanese novelist/journalist Jaber parallels family intimacy and wartime suffering. The story is narrated by Maroun, who lives with his family in war-shattered Beirut's Christian east during the Lebanese Civil War. When his younger brother was kidnapped and killed, their father became a killer himself; one chilling scene shows him joining in the slaughter of a family quaking in their car and bringing home the injured young son to raise as his own. It slowly emerges that Maroun is that child, and he tells his story not with bitterness but almost wonder as he tries to sift the truth from his memories, which include many tender moments with his new kin. Meanwhile, his coming of age is defined by falling bombs and risky but exhilarating trips to the demarcation line. VERDICT Quietly and absorbingly told, Maroun's journey is Lebanon's, and it's valuable reading.

Copyright 2016 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

July 1, 2016

"My father used to kidnap people and kill them." Who can resist that opening line? In a long and sometimes rambling narrative, Maroun describes growing up in Beirut during the Lebanese Civil War. His father and older brother disappear for days with no explanation, and no one dares ask where they go. Maroun has an ailing mother, and he lives in the shadow of his dead older brother, who shares his name. He doesn't learn all the family secrets until his older brother tells all while their father is on his deathbed, and the guilt and turmoil almost destroy Maroun. Teens will understand the boy's desire to use education to escape from his existing life-he learns English because he knows he wants to move away from Lebanon. Maroun copes with depression in college as he comes to terms with his personal history and the emotional abuse he endured as a child. Give to teens who enjoy reading coming-of-age novels that take place in other countries, such as Khaled Hosseini's The Kite Runner. VERDICT This is an accessible Middle Eastern novel that will fill a gap in most libraries.-Sarah Hill, Lake Land College, Mattoon, IL

Copyright 2016 School Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.