Meeting the dead or missing father motivated your writing, and I must admit that I was surprised that Samir, as an adult, found the man who had abandoned him in Germany with his mother and sister. How could I imagine him imprisoned in an urn under a meter of snow? I had to create another resting place for him… In a book. My father was a man of wanderings and travels. Yes, I wrote a story when my father died, a story in which an already grown-up girl meets the ghost of her father who asks to be buried somewhere other than in a cold and sinister Montreal cemetery where the family, without giving it much thought, had already put his body to rest. My father who, when he died, gave me permission to write a story too: La ballade d’Ali Baba. He came to Canada in 1957 to escape the war. Upon reading you, I thought a great deal about my father, my Greek father who spent his life in Algeria. What could be more romantic than the quest for a father? And yet in your text, fiction is based on Lebanon’s history, its pains and its hopes. I enjoyed being seduced by these stories perpetually weaving themselves together, these surprising journeys that made us laugh and cry all at once.
Your book is akin to Scheherazade, filled with adventures and twists and turns it is a text of a thousand and one nights and days, a detective story of the child psyche, a discrete essay on immigration.
Exchange glances how to#
How to forget a father who dreamed up tales for his son? How to mourn his stories, especially when he disappears one day like a character in a tale? Samir’s father is a great storyteller he is a magician who amazes children and adults, who invents stories to put them to sleep, or to plant in them a desire that will someday bloom. Even if Lebanon and its sunlight are very present, the narrator is just like his father: he imitates him by sharing his story and that of his fascination for him. I write night because it felt to me as though your text was one of darkness, of sleep, or more specifically of storytelling. One day perhaps, surely, we will meet, but for the moment I am simply entering the night of your words, repeating them with you. We are still imagining ourselves in a meeting that has yet to come we are suspending time. I seem to prefer to hold on to the imagined friendship generated by books.īut we are not quite meeting here I am simply writing you a letter. It is perhaps to maintain this illusion of closeness that I do not like to meet authors of books that speak to me. A reader’s dream! After reading only one book, I find myself thinking: Pierre Jarawan. We do not know each other, but I have just read your book In the End, the Cedars Remain, and already I feel close to you, as if I had entered a world - yours -, and that this access had created intimacy between us.
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