It’s a shame the first descriptor that comes to mind when many people think about the Lebanese is “resilient.” We are also stubborn, prone to aggrandizement, benevolently delusional, enterprising, petty and inclined toward generosity no matter how personally ruinous.
You can’t miss the spectrum of Levantine humanity in “A History of the Big House,” a 2005 novel by the Lebanese writer Charif Majdalani, newly translated into English. The book traces the fortunes of the Nassar family in the early 20th century, as what is now Lebanon changes hands from Ottoman rule to French mandate. At the heart of the story is Wakim Nassar, the narrator’s grandfather, who might well be the Forrest Gump of Mount Lebanon for how frequently his life coincides with major historical developments in the region.
Wakim’s first exile occurs when he is a young man, pushed out of his hometown near Beirut. An altercation or misunderstanding — probably over a woman — “threatened civil peace” and “almost reignited religious warfare,” according to family lore.
Driven to the mountains and accompanied by his younger brother, Wakim arrives in Ayn Chir, a poor farming area, and sets about building a legacy. He staves off Bedouin encroachment and establishes prosperous orange orchards. Those groves are where he allegedly invents the clementine, the same lore goes, and he enchants people from across the Mediterranean with the fruit.
Most important, he constructs a grand estate and fills it with a chic Orthodox Christian wife, steadfast daughters and (mostly) upright sons. His loyal, seven-fingered right-hand man assumes a mythic quality, and in time, the Big House earns a reputation as a haven for men fleeing the Ottoman draft or simply locals in need of advice, a loan or both. Throughout Ayn Chir, Wakim’s “name starts to sound like the snap of a hoisted flag in all their conversations, haloed with respect and reverence.”
All this biographical detail is hard-won, coaxed out of Wakim’s children and relatives by the narrator over years. You can forgive Wakim’s outlandish résumé, knowing it was pieced together from family pride that bordered on jingoism. Fortunately, the story is aware of these limitations; the narrator cuts in with winking metacommentary, noting at one point that an event “apparently must have been almost instantly transmuted or lost in the hazy limbo of rumor and hearsay, before it was reconstituted in the memory of his descendants in the form of implausible legends.”
Majdalani, in Ruth Diver’s translation, is a pleasure to read, as he unfurls lyrical sentences and conjures unexpected, poignant images: “frail eucalyptus trees swaying in the slightest breeze like grieving women,” or a character afflicted with “the deliciously clumsy gait of a bear or an astronaut.” His fluency with Lebanese history, particularly its cycles of prosperity and ruin, propels the story, though you’d be forgiven for finding the internecine sectarian politics occasionally dizzying.
It’s no spoiler to report that Wakim’s fortunes wane as time goes on. As he falters in old age, the Big House does, too. But the endurance of family memory — its tacit elisions, its elasticity — can reveal as much about history as a sprawling home scented of oranges.
Though the Big House is in shambles, the novel is plenty.
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