The American Quarter

A love letter to a city of his childhood, Jabbour Douaihy's The American Quarter is set in an enclave of stairways in the Mediterranean port of Tripoli, on the northern coast of Lebanon. Unfolding at the height of the US-led invasion of Iraq, it revolves around the radicalization of an ordinary youth named Ismail. But Ismail's story is part of a larger one that entails his father Bilal, a massacre survivor; his young disabled brother, whom Ismail looks after; his spirited mother Intisar, a maid like her mother before her in the wealthy, powerful Azzam household; and Abdelkarim, the Azzam family's only son, addicted to poetry and opera, and pining for his lost Polish ballerina--all depicted by Douaihy with irony and affection. As well, Ismail's fate is entwined with the disappointments and meager prospects of those around him in the deteriorating American Quarter, and of others like himself forced to crisscross conflict-scarred lands. Ismail's reckoning with his assigned fatal mission somehow comes to reflect our own struggles'for redemption, for faith in life in the face of destructive forces that can erase in an instant what is dear to us. A suspenseful classic for our time, in a superb translation by Paula Haydar, The American Quarter is a powerful, compassionate work of great beauty. Paying homage to the spirit of a beloved old city and her people, it bolsters us with a gifted writer's long view of the threats to tolerance and trust we now face.