The Arsonists’ City

Written By Linda Malek

The Arsonists' City by Hala Alyan
Reviewed by Linda
📘📘📘📘

The Arsonists' City is an ode to the beautiful city of Beirut and is the beating heart of the Nasr family. With the backdrop of the Lebanese Civil War, the Syrian occupation of Lebanon, and the more recent war on Syria, the product is a rich inter-generational story, that spans across oceans from the motherland out into the diaspora, and back again. And this is a genre that Hala is a master of.

In Damascus, Syrian-born Mazna meets Beiruti Idris and his Palestinian friend Zakaria, and it is in Beirut at Idris' ancestral home, that Mazna, Idris, and their grown children and grandchildren return to after decades in the US. This is very much a character-driven novel where each chapter reveals another intimacy about each member of the family. Hala takes the time to introduce us to each person in detail, each chapter revealing another intimacy, flaw, or secret about each member of the Nasr family. Born & raised in the US, the Nasr children seem pretty content with their lives as Americans. They've drifted apart from each other but strangely, Idris' decision to return to Lebanon and sell his father's home, is a move that reunites the entire family back to where it all began. This reminded me of that home away from home feeling that I sometimes have - although born and raised in London, there is an attachment to the motherland for me and the selling up of my ancestral home would probably drive me to revisit my parent's upbringing and reminisce about my childhood memories with the elder generations who are no more.

The story flits between past and present, but it’s the stories of the parents' respective pasts and these older generations fascinated me the most. How life was like back then, the core love story between Mazna & Idris - the betrayal, the loyalty, and mutual understanding, their later acclimatisation to rural California as asylum seekers, and starting all over again. They say that children are a map of their parents, and Hala draws all the lines of this map with dedication. This isn't a fast read, but a detailed, emotional & messy family history to be devoured slowly - highly recommend.

Linda Malek

I've always had the urge to set up a forum and voice my thoughts after each read, but never had the confidence to do so alone. 18 months ago, I got my fellow book-loving friends involved and formed The Candid Book Club! Aside from having an exponentially growing to-read pile and deteriorating shortsightedness, we've been lucky to have been invited to publisher events and have attended several talks with our favourite authors (Thank you and long may they continue!) To take a break from the pressures of PhD Chemistry, Jess and I exchanged books all the time and in my youth, I was that kid with the first editions of Harry Potter having already read Gulliver’s travels and some Charles Dickens. At work, my desk is a library and luckily for me I sit next to another bookworm Jack who entertains all the photo-taking. I'm suffering from a chronic case of wanderlust (age-related crisis) so books which are set as far away from home as possible tend to float my boat: Middle East, Israeli-Palestinian conflict, Asia...you name it. But if it's got anything to do with Egypt then I'm all over it. So you get the drift...I read all the time, everywhere (on the tube mostly), everyday, a book a week, and very quickly I'm onto the next! And then sometimes there is a book that stops me in my tracks, makes me want to swallow the pages whole, and have it next to me at all times, with some sentences staying with me forever: Shantaram by David Gregory Roberts, anything by Khaled Hosseini, The Shadow of the Wind by Carlos Ruiz Zafon, Stay With Me by Ayobami Adebayo (absolute gem of a woman), A Little Life by Hanya Yanagihara, A Fine Balance by Rohinton Mistry, The Good Immigrant edited by Nikesh Shuklaand and anything by Naguib Mahfouz.

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