Reviews | Beirut, a bruised city, in two poignant novels

Beirut, August 4, 2020. The catastrophe of too many. The drop that overflows an already filled vase, in a country in overdose of tragedies. Who pushes the narrator of the novel Implosions to revolt, and that of Beirut Syndrome to run away. These new titles have both germinated in the ruins left by the deadly explosion that ravaged the port of the Lebanese capital in the midst of a pandemic last year. And offer us a romanticized look, in very successful works, on hot issues of the day.

Laila Maalouf
Press

Implosions : when everything implodes ★★★ ½

Implosions, by writer Hyam Yared, who lives between Beirut and Paris, begins this fateful August 4. “At six seven, maybe eight or nine – the minutes vary – the weather was fine. I was alive. On all fours. […] Under the desk. Waiting for the third explosion, the fourth, the fifth, ”she wrote.

When a mushroom of smoke covers the city, everyone believes in an attack. A mother recounts the general panic, the chaos that follows, the same day, then the five days that follow. But under the debris, a much more intimate drama unfolds: the personal war of this woman, already the mother of three daughters, divorced, who, at more than 40 years old, once again believed in love, remarried and is engaged in two new maternities “between the shores of the absurd and the hope”.

She recounts the therapy sessions with her husband, trying to understand how she once again found herself locked in a box, performing acts contrary to her “Beauvoirian” ideas, suffocated by confinement, a motherhood that did not nothing to do with the one before the pandemic and a country that keeps robbing it of all its hopes.

Everything implodes in her life and around her; her defeats mingle with the fate of a routed nation which, she says, is just a dream that has driven all her fellow citizens mad. Despite everything, she decided to stay in this country “where the Mafiosi cling to power like periwinkles on sea reefs”. And so she finds herself at Place des Martyrs, writing an emergency number on her hand in case the demonstration turns out badly and shouting in front of “the spectacle” of her homeland on her knees. Because, as she writes it so well, in a colorful language and of an implacable force, one must believe in the future for it to exist.

Implosions

Hyam yared

Ecuador

268 pages

★★★½

Beirut Syndrome : an uninterrupted series of dramas ★★★ ½

The heroine of Beirut Syndrome, by the writer and journalist Alexandre Najjar, is a witness to history on the move, over the decades that have seen Lebanon destroy itself, rebuild itself, liberate itself and then plunge again into chaos after the explosion of August 4, 2020.

Journalist, the character of Amira Mitri left Lebanon at the age of 18. The young woman was forced by her father to go to study in Paris to get away from this civil war in which she had decided to take part. She returns to Lebanon after an absence of 22 years and works there in the daily life. An-Nahar, where she fulfills her dream of becoming a reporter.

However, she finds herself counting the losses, deaths and scandals in an uninterrupted series of tragedies, to finally save herself, 20 years later, after the “terrible year” of 2020.

The “Beirut syndrome”, explains the author, is a form of resignation, of resilience similar to the Stockholm syndrome which consists in “coming to terms with horror without rebelling, taking the blows without returning them”. But Amira ends up abdicating, losing this “war of nerves” and ultimately chooses exile.

If this novel offers an interesting look at the recent history of the country, emphasizing political facts through the narrative, it echoes Implosions and can be read in parallel as the two novels complement each other. Because these two very different titles tell the same country and embody, each in its own way, the only avenues open to adversity: flight or combat.

Beirut syndrome

Alexandre najjar

Plon

320 pages

★★★½