![]() ![]() ![]() Still, he wrote, “if nothing else, I could be a witness.” Witnessing, and the question of how best to express what you’ve witnessed, is at the heart of his seventh novel, “ The Wrong End of the Telescope.” He’s plainly decided that earnest, eat-your-vegetables social realism is inadequate it would be no better than the journalism Westerners have diligently ignored since Syria’s civil war began a decade ago. Perhaps, he thought before departing from his home in San Francisco for his first trip, the children in the camps would enjoy talking about soccer? One refugee woman flung his questions back in his face: “If I talk with you, will anything change?” He had only one answer to that. By his own admission - in a fine 2017 essay titled “ Hope and Home” - he approached his visits deeply naive. In recent years, the writer Rabih Alameddine has visited Syrian refugees in his native Lebanon and the Greek island of Lesbos. If you buy books linked on our site, The Times may earn a commission from, whose fees support independent bookstores. ![]()
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |