About book House Of Stone: A Memoir Of Home, Family, And A Lost Middle East (2012)
Sadly, the Pulitzer Prize winning reporter for the Washinton Post and New York Times, did not get to enjoy the success of his novel; ironically, the journalist who had been severely wounded while covering the Israeli-Palestinian war, died at the age 43 from an asthma attack. His only novel is about restoring his ancestral home in the largely Christian town of Marja¬youn in southern Lebanon that had been battered by wars for centuries. Accounts of how Shadid gets to know the town’s people better while looking for carpenters, builders, and foremen are interspersed with musings and flashback about his family history. While his stories about the Levant and his immigrant family in the United States are both amusing and painful, they were not enough for me to fall in love with the House of Stone. To me, Anthony Shadid remains first and foremost a fantastic war correspondent, who not only elucidates and educates his readers about the roots of conflicts, but also puts a human face to suffering. The parts about war were the strongest ones that made me feel the depth of the despair and impotence people in war-torn countries feel. Shadid made me realize that we, privileged people in nations not at war, live in a sort of cocoon, clean and pure, unaffected by the stench of war which clings to its victims and seeps into their pores. He made me feel the effects of carnage on other continents, where people live in overcrowded, dysentery-infested refugee camps, where history is interrupted, lives are put on hold, perhaps never to be fully lived again in this limbo of a shadow world, where every step in the dark, electricity-lacking streets is a tentative one, waiting for a mine to explode. That is not what Shadid wrote, but it is what I felt and understood. Quite a feat, yet not enough to make a novel a work of enduring literary value. I’d rather celebrate Anthony Shadid as the great journalist that he was than the aspiring novelist whose promise he never quite got to fulfill. Shadid brings to life the Levantine setting and characters, past and present, just as well as he brought his patriarch's old house back to life. I could easily picture myself right there with the author. Even though this is labelled a memoir, I enjoyed how the house almost becomes the protagonist. Unlike some commenters, I thought he did well on writing unbiased. And despite my own differences with the author and his supporting cast, I was surprised to find myself at times relating to them!
Do You like book House Of Stone: A Memoir Of Home, Family, And A Lost Middle East (2012)?
This one surprised me. Nothing much to the story but the characters in this are fascinating.
—megs
Learned something about a part of the world I know so little about.
—book_nerdie
