A Week of Books Featuring Writing and Publishing

Note: On Monday, I talked about All Men Are Liars, whose characters are all in the writing and publishing business. Wednesday’s book,  Alys Always, in contemporary England, also centers on the business of writing. And today we go to Beirut for a year with a freelance writer and editor. It just happens that three books landed on my reading pile that deal quite prominently with writing, reading, and publishing. So it seemed logical to group them together this week.

Destination: Beirut, Lebanon

Book: Jasmine and Fire: A Bittersweet Year in Beirut (New June 2012) by Salma Abdelnour

Salma Abdelnour is not your average homeless person.  But in these pages, she spends a year looking for a home.

She is an experienced writer and editor with plenty of contacts in prestigious New York  publishing outlets, an education at Berkeley, and parents wealthy enough to have escaped the civil war (1970s-1980s) when she was nine and they held on to their Lebanon apartment when they settled in Houston. Abdelnour has anguished about whether home is Beirut or New York, and so she packs up her freelance writing career, sublets her New York apartment, says bye-bye to her non-committal boyfriend Richard and moves into her parent’s place in Beirut.  She has assignments to work on. Not to mention (and she doesn’t mention it) a book contract.

Beirut is not a stranger. She has visited nearly every year with her family, and she is surrounded by family in Lebanon. Not exactly an excruciating and risky voyage of discovery, and yet she excruciates at length.

I give her credit for exploring so many aspects of life in Lebanon and particularly in Beirut. It is a vastly confusing society with a complex history, and she gives us verbal snapshots from many angles in Jasmine and Fire.

She likes to meander on foot through Beirut which is a good thing, since she takes us along and let’s us see her favorite (or is it her 2nd favorite?) city.  But Jasmine and Fire also meanders through her thoughts and that’s not such a good thing.  The early part of the memoir struck me as way too steam-of-consciousness and self-involved.  “Well, come on, it IS a memoir. Of course it’s about self.” “Yeah, but as a reader I want to know the results of the pondering, not have to relive every single thought and doubt.” I’m looking for a bit more universality and insight than the erroneous assumption that only the Lebanese idealize their homeland when they move away. Come on. Ever meet an Irishman? A Frenchman? Any immigrant? To be fair, she does seem to attempt universality by introducing the question of what is home and how do we know when we are there.  But this is almost exclusively in the light of Lebanese expats in America.

Despite the stated  purpose–“Do I belong here or there; will my romance survive or wither?”–the book seems to lack focus. Each chapter covers a month of her stay (with side trips and two quick trips back to the U.S.). Each chapter also subtly covers a slightly different segment of life in Beirut–politics, treatment of women, food, activism, etc.  Entertaining is a big subject. Oh those Beirut party animals.  Abdelnour takes up a lot of space telling us about friends she has met—names them and describes them–but they come and go and few seem to play a really important role. They are just a lot of extras brought in to highlight her budding social life and the importance of family life. Information like that could have been conveyed in a few well-chosen scenes.

Besides a free apartment and supportive relatives, Abdelnour has an advantage over most visitors or temporary residents because she speaks Arabic.  That benefits the reader as well, as  she takes the reader along on her explorations of places she has never seen–outside of Beirut as well as in the city itself.

Although I had trouble relating to a freelance writer flitting back and forth across the ocean with ease and finding plenty of jobs to support herself, I did relate to her inability to place the stories about Lebanon that she wanted to write. All editors want only two stories about Beirut, she says. Lebanon Collapses Again–Category A(“Tanks are rolling through Beirut’s streets…Bloodshed and destruction everywhere.”) and Beirut is Back–Category B (“Ah, this glittering seaside city, this jewel of the Mediterranean, this Paris of the Middle East…Beirut is back: thumping nightlife, beautiful women, stylish nightclubs…The Lebanese sure know how to party.” She consoles herself by writing on her blog where “at least I get to write exactly as I want and how I want, and take up as much space as I want.”  Amen, sister.

Because she is a sometime food writer, many meals are described in detail and a small but tasty collection of recipes appears at the end of the book. But having read Day of Honey by Anna Ciezadlo, where the focus truly was food, the food bits in Jasmine and Fire feel like an afterthought. It is almost as though someone said,”Oh, didn’t you write about food? Why don’t you add some recipes?”  Food and its preparation defined Ciezadlo’s relationship to various middle-Eastern places.  In Jasmine and Fire no single factor provides that anchor.

Of course Ciezadlo, although married to a Lebanese man, is American, Abdelnour is a native of Lebanon. There are other differences, too.  Jasmine and Fire is set in a peaceful Lebanon (2010-11), in the midst of the Arab Spring uprisings. Ciezadlo lived in Beirut from 2004 to 2007 when Civil War erupted once more. Interestingly, they lived in the same neighborhoo. This makes the two books together valuable background reading for anyone contemplating a trip to Lebanon.

I will admit that I was sorely tempted to stop reading in the first quarter of the book. I wanted the author to just get on with her life and stop the navel gazing, hand-wringing. Hadn’t she ever seen a Nike ad? Just Do IT.  But having stuck with it, I found much of value in the book and learned a great deal about Lebanon, particularly in the sections set outside of Beirut. It is an intriguing place that I’ve long wanted to visit.

…I’ve been making a list of places I want to take Richard, and all the angles of this country I want to show him: Lebanon as beautiful site of ancient civilizations, and Beirut as crazy bad-ass city, gentle old Mediterranean port town, hipster-bar-scene central, and eternally mixed-up schizophrenic, unstable, but ultimately lovable place.

She loves Beirut, but finds true peace in the country home of an uncle in southern Lebanon, an area that outsiders cannot visit. Ironically it is a more tolerant society than Beirut, and she thinks,

I want Richard here with me, too, and I don’t want to call this Lebanon and that Israel, and me here an Arab, and him there a Jew.  Just both here, both there, or wherever, the important thing being the smell of the trees, the sound of those tittering insects–are they crickets?–and the bird I’m hearing now with its loud wa-wa-wa call.  The important thing being the sounds and the smells and the air and life–and whoever loves it here, on this land, can live on it, work it, be here, and that’s all.  But we’re not there yet and maybe never will be, the region, the word, human civilizations.

I, too, wish that we could get to that place. And I wish that all the writing in this book had been this fine.

You can read Abdelnour’s essay in Forbes about her stay in Beirut. But just in case you don’t click through to that, here’s the list of essential reading she includes in that article:

– Beirut by Samir Kassir (University of California Press, 2010)
– Pity the Nation by Robert Fisk (Thunder’s Mouth Press/Nation Books, 2002)
– Beirut 39: New Writing from the Arab World, edited by Samuel Shimon (Bloomsbury, 2010)
– Lebanon: Through Writers’ Eyes, edited by Ted and Andree Feghali Gorton (Eland Books, 2009)
– A World I Loved by Wadad Makdisi Cortas (Nation Books, 2009)
– For general daily updates on Lebanese news, politics, and cultural events: iloubnan.info

And my own personal recommendation:  Read Abdelnour’s blog. (Update: Unfortunately she does not write the blog any more, but you can find some food commentary on her website.) Much more about food and much livelier than the book. And it has pictures, too.

Do you have a place you once lived that calls to you? That you think you should return to?

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