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TITLE: The House of Mathilde |
AUTHOR: Hassan Daoud |
PUB: |
DATE: January 9, 2001 |
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Translated by Peter Theroux Certain novels inspire in us the visceral shock of discovery that we most often associate with travel and with landscape, with rounding a bend and coming upon a panoramic, breathtaking vista, at once eerily familiar and terrifyingly strange. One such book is The House of Mathilde, Hassan Daoud's powerful saga in which the forces of history, greed, obsession and Machiavellian intrigue turn a somnolent apartment block in Beirut into a rich, corrupt microcosm. Set in the civil war, the novel sits on that stormy front where past and present collide and unleash a damaging hail of temporal dislocation. The novel glitters with brilliant, refractory character portraits. At its labyrinthine center is Mathilde, the Emma Bovary-like tenant who shelters a war refugee, and the refugee himself - ominously nameless - who plots, calculates, and flatters his way into her favour. Our immersion in the refugee's machinations is so total and so dreamlike that Daoud must rouse us at intervals to witness how the pattern of the ordinary lives of the building's other Muslim and Christian tenants changes as society disintergrates around them. He quietly brings us to an understanding of the way in which the world of the Lebanese village, with its clan and family loyalties, was recreated in the city, and registers the country's sectarian divisions with great subtlety. When violence does intrude, it is all the more shocking in such an intimate setting. The characters speak in folksy, epigrammatic proverbs that sound natural and colloquial. Its skilled translator, Peter Theroux, has done a splendid job with effortless cadences to support an impressive range of tones, from the lyrical and poetic to the gritty talk of the souk. What makes the novel so fascinating and so tricky to describe is that its texture and narrative methods embrace so many seeming contradictions - paradoxes that mirror perfectly the book's atmosphere and themes. The House of Mathilde is simultaneously sweeping and claustrophobic, traditional and timely, linear and digressive, serious and satiric. It's a complicated book, crowded with incident and character, requiring close, unflagging attention. Format: Paperback, 181pp. Publisher: Granta Publication Pub. Date: 1999 Retail Price: LL29,000 Reviewed by Carl Gibeily END |