[pullquote]Through the eyes of this half-simple, half-mystical young man, like a character by the Lebanese poet Khalifa Gibran (1883 – 1931), a whole world is seen collapsing under the he effect of a war … But, with Samar Yazbek’s skill, this collapse is told in a minor key, as if the essential were elsewhere, in the life to which those who remain cling[/pullquote]

A soldier wounded by friendly fire – a bomb dropped by mistake on his patrol – is dying at the foot of a tree, on the crests of a mountain. Between his vain attempts to get up and appreciate the seriousness of his wounds, the delusions provoked by the pain and the exacerbated consciousness specific to the moments which precede death, Ali revisits the defining moments of his short life. From the burial of his eldest brother, killed in the war, until the day when, arrested at a militia’s checkpoint, he is in turn enrolled in the Syrian army.

(…)

FUSIONAL LINK WITH NATURE

(…)

This fusional bond with nature is what best characterizes Ali, the central character and narrator of the novel. Which gives us very beautiful pages where the writing of Samar Yazbek, impeccably translated by Ola Mehanna and Khaled Osman, evokes Giono. But the Alaouite djebel has not, or rather no longer has, much to do with the mountain of Lure (Ales-de-Haute-Provence), in a country where these mountaineers, already at the bottom of the social ladder in ordinary times, barely survive since the outbreak of the “war” – which is here never qualified, and takes a kind of immanence.

(…)

Through the eyes of this half-simple, half-mystical young man, like a character by the Lebanese poet Khalifa Gibran (1883 – 1931), a whole world is seen collapsing under the he effect of a war that only pushes to its climax the controlled cutting-up of the country and the oppression imposed for decades by the regime of Assad father and son. But, with Samar Yazbek’s skill, this collapse is told in a minor key, as if the essential were elsewhere, in the life to which those who remain cling. Like Nahla, Ali’s mother, who was walled in silence by the death of her eldest son, enlisted as a volunteer in the army, but also embarked “on a business which before that would have seemed unimaginable: transforming the embankment at the foot of their cultivable terraced house”. Or like La Rouquine, the Red-head, the centenary of the village, whom Ali liked to hang out with and who fights in her own way – through laughter – against the abuses of the regime’s henchmen. “God preserve us from this laughter,” she told him one day. You saw, Ali, as soon as people do nothing, it scares them. We laugh, and boom, we are scared…”.

This novel with a lyrical breath takes us to these mountains which were a “paradise of greenery” and are today “in the process of desertification”. An authentic funeral dirge, ode to a world condemned to disappearance under the combined effects of the tyranny of the regime and the civil war, perhaps the most beautiful novel that we can read by Samar Yazbek to date.