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A review by marc129
Adrift: How Our World Lost Its Way by Amin Maalouf, Frank Wynne
3.0
“My sorrows all tell the same story, that of a great hope that ended up being disappointed, betrayed, distorted or annihilated.”
In the autumn of his life, the celebrated French-Lebanese writer Amin Maalouf (b. 1949) looks back on the world of the past 70 years, which he more or less consciously experienced, among other things as a journalist. From the beginning of this book, he makes no secret of the fact that this is going to be a long lamentation, a description of everything that has gone wrong and continues to go wrong. His focus initially rests on the Arab world, and first and foremost on his beloved homeland of Lebanon. He remembers with nostalgia the laboriously negotiated social-political pact that allowed people with different convictions and backgrounds to live together there, with respect and recognition for the difference. That model has been shattered since the 1970s and since then things have only gone downhill for the Arab world and the world in general.
Maalouf is not sparing in pointing out scapegoats. He places a fundamental responsibility on Egyptian President Nasser and his xenophobic Arab nationalism, which ended ingloriously with the defeat against Israel in 1967, thus giving room for reactionary Islamism to take over the voice of the oppressed and frustrated. The Palestinians are also getting hit hard; their opportunism dragged Lebanon into conflict with Israel, turning coexistence into a bloody civil war. It got really bad from 1979 onwards, when conservatives all over the world came to power, with Thatcher in England, Reagan in the US and Khomeini in Iran as epigones. This was accompanied by a rise of identitarian movements that set people against each other and denounced any sense of community. And so Maalouf goes on and on, at a furious speed downhill, also looking in fear at the cataclysms that await us.
I found the first half of this book quite interesting and fascinating, when Malouf's focus mainly was on the Arab world. But the accumulation of jeremiads reveling in nostalgia in the second half was too much for me. Maalouf is well aware of the bleakness of his analyses, but sees no way to put on a more rosy lens. Grown up with a firm belief in the universalist, secular values of equality and brotherhood, he clearly is a man stuck in the past, failing to offer solutions for today or tomorrow.
In the autumn of his life, the celebrated French-Lebanese writer Amin Maalouf (b. 1949) looks back on the world of the past 70 years, which he more or less consciously experienced, among other things as a journalist. From the beginning of this book, he makes no secret of the fact that this is going to be a long lamentation, a description of everything that has gone wrong and continues to go wrong. His focus initially rests on the Arab world, and first and foremost on his beloved homeland of Lebanon. He remembers with nostalgia the laboriously negotiated social-political pact that allowed people with different convictions and backgrounds to live together there, with respect and recognition for the difference. That model has been shattered since the 1970s and since then things have only gone downhill for the Arab world and the world in general.
Maalouf is not sparing in pointing out scapegoats. He places a fundamental responsibility on Egyptian President Nasser and his xenophobic Arab nationalism, which ended ingloriously with the defeat against Israel in 1967, thus giving room for reactionary Islamism to take over the voice of the oppressed and frustrated. The Palestinians are also getting hit hard; their opportunism dragged Lebanon into conflict with Israel, turning coexistence into a bloody civil war. It got really bad from 1979 onwards, when conservatives all over the world came to power, with Thatcher in England, Reagan in the US and Khomeini in Iran as epigones. This was accompanied by a rise of identitarian movements that set people against each other and denounced any sense of community. And so Maalouf goes on and on, at a furious speed downhill, also looking in fear at the cataclysms that await us.
I found the first half of this book quite interesting and fascinating, when Malouf's focus mainly was on the Arab world. But the accumulation of jeremiads reveling in nostalgia in the second half was too much for me. Maalouf is well aware of the bleakness of his analyses, but sees no way to put on a more rosy lens. Grown up with a firm belief in the universalist, secular values of equality and brotherhood, he clearly is a man stuck in the past, failing to offer solutions for today or tomorrow.