My rating: 4 out of 5
Book review:
Amin Maalouf was born in Beirut, his mother in Cairo (where his parents also married) and he later moved to France, when the Lebanese civil war started in 1975. All these places, plus others like Istanbul and Haifa, are present in Ports of Call, as the characters move to and fro between them. Above all there is the Levant, the Ancient Land, the magical place where the sun rises (in French, levant means rising, while Orient derives from the Latin oriens meaning east).
One day, while on the metro, the narrator recognizes a man from a picture in his history book (how crazy is that?). He follows the man and eventually manages to talk to him, even break the barrier of being strangers, which prompts the old man to recount his life. When the narrator asks Ossyan Ketabdar to begin his story from the moment he was born, the latter replies: Are you sure the life of a human being begins at birth? What follows is a story so complex and unbelievable that it almost seems to be true. Some of it has the dreamlike quality of a fairy tale, or a tale from A Thousand and One Nights.
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