La Maison sans Racines - Andrée Chedid

Andrée Chedid died in Paris in March 2011, aged 90.  She was essentially a French writer, though her family is originally Lebanese, and Egyptian.  She herself was born in Egypt, brought up to speak English and French and Arabic, but lived in France from 1946.  
This novel is set just before the outbreak of the civil war in Lebanon in 1975, and is written around a single incident - two young women, one Christian, one Muslim wearing a yellow scarf to symbolise hope, meet in the centre of a square. A shot rings out - one of them falls to the ground, and Kalya, a grandmother, approaches the two of them.   Intertwined with this key incident, which is told in short two  or three page bursts, are two longer stories, which give it a factual and emotional context.  The first, set in 1932, concerns a holiday Kalya spent as a child with her grandmother Nouza.  In the second, Kalya, herself now a grandmother who lives in Paris, is spending a holiday in Beirut with her own (nine-year-old?) grand-daughter, Sybil, who lives in New York.  


A mix of cultures, times and lives that encompasses much of the twentieth century Middle East, but through the close family relationships, and filtered through the cultures of the West as well.


The ending is shocking, but logical, and the book ends with a symbol of hope - the scarf floating.


(still in progress)