Origins is at once a gripping family chronicle and a timely consideration of Lebanese culture and politics. But he never loses track of his story's central thread: his quest to lift the shadow of legend from his family's past.

He moves with great agility across time and space, and across genres of writing. Maalouf is an energetic and amiable narrator, illuminating the more obscure corners of late Ottoman nationalism, the psychology of Lebanese sectarianism, and the dynamics of family quarrels. Why did Boutros, a poet and educator in Lebanon, travel across the globe to rescue his younger brother, Gebrayel, who had settled in Havana? Set during the last quarter of the nineteenth century and the first quarter of the twentieth, in the mountains of Lebanon and in Havana, Cuba, Origins recounts the family history of the generation of Maalouf's paternal grandfather, Boutros. By the recourse to French language in his fictional production, he contributes to the development of a dialogue of the cultures between the two shores of the Mediterranean.Origins, by the world-renowned writer Amin Maalouf, is a sprawling, hemisphere-spanning intergenerational saga. A plural and enriching identity brings him a new existential dimension that allows him to expose proudly his genealogical alignment and to assert his membership to a well specific Lebanese community. But in this novel, he felt the vital need to renew his origins and call upon his historical commemoration to be found with himself, to reconcile himself with his identity without considering it rather as promoting than “deadly”.

Born in Lebanon in 1949, living now in France, and having received the price of Goncourt in 1993, the writer has always had difficulties talking about his roots. This novel, which is distinguished from his previous works by its autobiographical aspect, is endowed with a well solid and judicious argumentation and limpid prose that makes the fluid and specified writing erect this Lebanese writer in the row of the most gifted and promising figures in the field of French-speaking literature of the East Mediterranean. With his last novel Origins that received the Price Mediterranean 2004, the Lebanese writer Amin Maalouf realized a cut fresco in the history that presents itself as a love song and expression of gratitude with regard to his family.

Amin maalouf origins