Ports of Call (Paperback, New Ed)

A young Lebanese man in Paris recognizes an old man on the Metro as a face from his school history book; someone who had left the Lebanon during World War II to fight with the Resistance in France. The elderly Ossayne responds to the young man's friendly approach, and soon is telling his life story. This begins long before his birth, in the house of a deposed sovereign whose suicide causes his daughter to lose her wits. The daughter is Ossayne's grandmother, and he describes his father's privileged upbringing in an Ottoman household in Adana, which ends in 1909, when, in a gesture of rebellion, the young Turkish aristocrat flees with his Armenian tutor to Mont Lebanon. He marries his tutor's daughter, and they call their son Ossayne, a name which represents his father's protest against a history of sectarianism and violence. During the Resistance Ossayne marries a beautiful Jewish woman and moves to Haifa, but there is a cruel fate in store for this happy young couple. Malouf's first novel to have a contemporary setting dramatizes the conflict and anarchy that have beset his native Lebanon in the past century through the story of one man's life. It is also a beautiful work of fiction that tells a poignant love story. (Kirkus UK)

Ossyane, a young Lebanese of both aristocratic Ottoman and humble Armenian origins, goes to Montpellier to study away from the burden of his liberal father’s revolutionary ambitions. World War II breaks out and Ossyane is drawn into the Resistance where he meets Clara who is Jewish. He returns to Beirut and, despite the obstacles, to a happy marriage with Clara. The Jewish-Muslim couple move to Haifa but, if one war has made a hero out of Ossyane, another, much closer to home, is destined to split him from his wife and separate him from the world and the people that he loves. In this delicate and compassionate novel Amin Maalouf brings the struggles in the Levant in the wake of World War II painfully to life. The tribulations and separations of Ossyane and Clara reflect, at an individual level, the problems that have beset the Middle East for fifty years.

General

Imprint:	The Harvill Press
Country of origin:	United Kingdom
Release date:	May 2001
First published:	July 2001
Authors:	Amin Maalouf
Translators:	Alberto Manguel
Dimensions:	198 x 129 x 13mm (L x W x T)
Format:	Paperback - B-format
Pages:	208
Edition:	New Ed
ISBN-13:	978-1-86046-890-2
Languages:	English
Subtitles:	French
Categories:	Books > Fiction > General & literary fiction > Modern fiction
LSN:	1-86046-890-X
Barcode:	9781860468902

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