Confessions
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5.0 • 1 Rating
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- $9.99
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- $9.99
Publisher Description
A powerful novel about trauma and forgiveness
Winner of the International Prize for Arabic Fiction
Finalist for the PEN Translation Prize
Finalist for the USA Translation Award
During the violence and chaos of the Lebanese Civil War, a car pulls up to a roadblock on a narrow side street in Beirut. After a brief and confused exchange, several rounds of bullets are fired into the car, killing everyone inside except for a small boy of four or five. The boy is taken to the hospital, adopted by one of the assassins, and raised in a new family. “My father used to kidnap and kill people …” begins this haunting tale of a child who was raised by the murderer of his real family. The narrator of Confessions doesn’t shy away from the horrible truth of his murderous father—instead he confronts his troubled upbringing and seeks to understand the distortions and complexities of his memories, his war-torn country, and the quiet war that rages inside of him.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
One day in 1976, Maroun, the narrator of this moving short novel from Lebanese author Jaber, is shot and wounded on the demarcation line that divides Beirut. A small child at the time, Maroun loses one family but gains another. "My father used to kidnap people and kill them," Maroun says in the arresting opening sentence about the man who adopts him. This new father has been committing these crimes ever since the murder of his little boy, whose bloody corpse with its tattered clothes was "dumped on the road between the Museum and the H tel-Dieu." Maroun grows up in a Beirut where war is almost a constant between 1976 and 1990. His untrustworthy memory and his place in his new family are ever-present concerns in a tortured tale that reveals the amazing ability of people to carve normality out of the most extreme and brutal conditions. Jaber sketches many memorable characters, none more unforgettable than his forever unsettled narrator.
