Romance between a Jew and a Muslim. The story of the French Resistance in WWII and one of its mysterious couriers. The Arab-Israeli conflict. The fall from grace of Beirut.
Maalouf manages to pack all this and more into less than 200 pages. There is a certain poignancy to a novella, or any short novel. When well written, they hint at setting; they pose questions but don't have answers, allowing readers to pontificate on such subjects for themselves. A short novel is not merely a short story (that is a whole other discussion). One can abridge the Count of Monte Cristo and you would have essentially the skeleton of a novel. A novella - or shorter novel - is sparse for other reasons than lack of substance; their depth is implicit in the telling of the story.
If you lack a historical context to the middle east, I would suggest "From Beirut to Jerusalem" by Thomas Friedman. I'm not sure why I feel compelled to include this information here, in a write up on a fictional novel by a franco-lebanese author. In reading this novel, which is captivating in and of itself, I found myself thinking of the conflict of the middle east - the permanence of this conflict seems to be juxtaposed by the fleetingness of the love story that develops in this novel.....
Maalouf manages to pack all this and more into less than 200 pages. There is a certain poignancy to a novella, or any short novel. When well written, they hint at setting; they pose questions but don't have answers, allowing readers to pontificate on such subjects for themselves. A short novel is not merely a short story (that is a whole other discussion). One can abridge the Count of Monte Cristo and you would have essentially the skeleton of a novel. A novella - or shorter novel - is sparse for other reasons than lack of substance; their depth is implicit in the telling of the story.
If you lack a historical context to the middle east, I would suggest "From Beirut to Jerusalem" by Thomas Friedman. I'm not sure why I feel compelled to include this information here, in a write up on a fictional novel by a franco-lebanese author. In reading this novel, which is captivating in and of itself, I found myself thinking of the conflict of the middle east - the permanence of this conflict seems to be juxtaposed by the fleetingness of the love story that develops in this novel.....
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