This is the dazzling, ferociously inventive, larger-than-life story of Tanios, folk hero of the fictional Lebanese village of Kfaryabda, unearthed in fragments and cobbled together by a curious local historian two generations after his mysterious disappearance.
I was astonished and delighted by Maalouf's meandering narration, which spools around and around each passage until it colours behind your eyelids. I loved the needlepoint intricacy of the geopolitical intrigue and the legerdemain with which the colonial threat was introduced. And I liked the introspection and temperance of the final act -- how moving and human.
Winner of the 1993 Prix Goncourt; translated by Dorothy S. Blair.
I thoroughly enjoyed Samarkand and The Gardens of Light and want to get around to reading Maalouf's other books eventually. This was actually low on the list for me but I may now get to it sometime sooner.
How serendipitous, I was just looking at those exact two books online and scheming to get them at a discount during Black Friday. This is the first and only book I've read by Maalouf and I have no idea how it compares to the two but I really was charmed by it.
Gardens of Light was certainly the more cohesive of the two. Samarkand felt like two tenuously connected novellas.