Voices of the lost by Hoda Barakat

Voices of the lost by Hoda Barakat

Lebanese fiction

Original title – Bareed al layl

Translator -Marilyn Booth

Source – Personal copy

Now I  move on to a prize-winning Arabic novel this won the ARABAIC booker prize a number of years ago. I am wanting to cover as many places as I can with this woman in translation. month so the next stop is a Leabanon and a writer that has won a lot of prizes for her writing she lived in Lebanon as her studying to her PHD which she did in Paris. She then took the brave design to move back to Lebanon and work initially as a teacher translator and journalist and then in the mood 80s she began to write. She finally left Lebanon to live  Paris in 1989. She has lifted there since other than when taking posts to work at colleges teaching. She has published six novels all in a way deal with her homeland of Lebanon. But the beauty of this book it is in an unnamed place and gives a sense of being anywhere.

The letter I found inside the hotel directory perplexed me. It worried me, actually. It talks about a young man, the letter writer himself. He wrote it in a cheaply rented furnished room in a street nearby, a rather run-down one, it seems. So how did the letter get here? Plus, it comes to an abrupt stop: it doesn’t really end. All in all, because of this letter, I’m feeling very uneasy about the writer. It’s not hard to imagine that he’s in prison, for instance. The letter has it that he was full of terrible imaginings about the secret police from his country of origin mounting surveillance on him. So it looks like he went to talk to their man,

The first letter a man that had run-in with the secret police

The book is formed of a chorus of unnamed voices of people as they each write a letter to someone close to them as they are on their way as a refugee on an unknown journey with an unknown destiny this means they open up in each of these letters to their family or a lost lover. As each letter tells the individual stories of secret police being watched, the horror of war. we aren’t told anything of the person just see the current person reading the letter they have found whether in a magazine or left on a seat or in the trash the stories of lost loves, children left behind those dreams broken by a war or just having to escape the situation you are in. A series of broken dreams lost hopes a chain of woe and hope at the same time.

My dear brother

I have been thinking about writing to you, now that you have learned what you call the truth?. You’re right to call it that, up to a point. But the pure, unadulterated truth is something other than what you believe it to be. Everyone has secrets, and you must help me with a secret of mine, because it is in both our interests. I don’t have much time.

We are waiting for a plane to land; it’s still in the air because the plane at this gate that was supposed to make way for it was delayed. They pulled a passenger off that departing flight. The plane had already taken off but they made it turn around and come back to the airport. I know why security took him away in handcuffs because I have a letter in my pocket that this man wrote to his mother.

another handover of letters.

 

The beauty of removing place is it makes it a universal tale of trying to escape where you can be trapped this reminds me of the opposite side of the Bushra Al Marqui book what have you left behind a series of witness statements of the Deaths and Losses in the Yemeni war personal reflections of their own worlds collapsing. Well this is the flip side of that story of what happens when you finally decide to leave behind community family, love children a million things and head on that uncertain refugee trail where the end is not known or even thought about just the wanting to get away from that place. as it has been retitling the voices of the lost and that is what it is a series of voices unknown people snapshots of the last thing they think but also the horror they have witnessed that lead them to leave their homeland.AS  they head into the world on an unknown trip the use of the letter is a great device it makes them seem more personal because are they even meant to be read or just the act of writing them is helping them on their way ! Have you read any good books dealing with being a refugee?

Winstons score – B a strong collection of lost letters that make a compelling novel .