A HISTORY OF THE BIG HOUSE

Multigenerational novel of life in a changing Lebanon.

“This is not the Wild West,” declares the narrator of Beirut writer Majdalani’s novel, originally published in French in 2005. But it is, in a way. At the end of the 19th century, paterfamilias Wakim Nassar and his younger brother Selim arrive in rural Mount Lebanon, “at the edge of the mulberry groves of Ayn Chir,” like what they see, and begin to settle down. They have left home, it seems, because of some unspecified transgression: “a simple brawl after a game of dominoes,” or perhaps “just something to do with women.” Wakim soon has a vision: He envisions an empire of orange trees. Although "the two men who have just arrived on horseback are not cowboys,” it is indeed the Wild West: Bedouins squat on Wakim’s land, insisting on ancestral rights to the well that now waters his orchards, and Wakim finds it necessary to recruit a contingent of fighters—in that happy earlier Lebanon, made up of a mix of Muslims and Christians that “resembles the ride of the Magnificent Seven”—to chase the Bedouins away. Having done so, Wakim is now ready to build the first two-story house in the village, the Big House, even as World War I breaks out and the ruling Ottomans find themselves on the way to history’s dustheap. Majdalani’s novel plays out against a broad sweep of history, when Turkish rule gives way to French: The only constant is the passing of generations and the slow crumbling of the Big House—but happily, with the promise of restoration, for like the rest of poor battered Lebanon, “this is where everything must soon begin all over again.” 

Deliberately paced and carefully written: a memorable evocation of a distant but not irrecoverable time.