Dominique Eddé - a novel about a group of people who know that they’re in a novel, some of which are busy struggling with writing their own novels, two of which are in love, one of which is content with his marriage to someone else: Freedom is mediocre compared with lunacy, which is so much more luminous and so much more obscure

Dominique Eddé, Kite, Trans. by Ros Schwartz, Seagull Books, 2012.


Rich and multilayered, with elements of both memoir and fiction, Dominique Eddé’s Kite defies categorization. Beginning in the 1960s and ending in the late ’80s, it is at once a narrative of a passionate, and ultimately tragic, relationship between Mali and Farid and the simultaneous decline of Egyptian-Lebanese society. Densely populated with myriad characters, Kite chronicles the casualties of social conventions, religious divisions and cultural clichés. The differences between East and West are central to the tension of Eddé’s book and share the responsibility for an unavoidable impasse between the lovers. This fragmented narrative—written in several voices that reflect the fragmented lives of those caught up in the madness of war—calls into question an entire way of living and thinking. In lyrical, elegant, original and often startling prose, Eddé weaves together multiple strands—meditating on the nature of language, investigating the concept of the novel, and powerfully depicting the experience of being blind. Deftly evoking the intellectual scene of Beirut in the ’60s, Lebanon’s mountainscapes and the urban settings of Cairo, Paris and London, Kite probes memory with a curious mix of irony and melancholy, ending up in a place beyond hope and despair.

Translator Ros Schwartz and Seagull Books have given English-language readers a brilliant, searing look at the layers of a very contemporary relationship in this translation of Dominque Eddé’s Kite. Going back and forth in time and in place—from Beirut to Paris, to Cairo and London—this book is both a powerful exploration of love and of the shifts in intellectual culture at a tumultuous time in the Arab and western worlds. Ros Schwartz deftly traces the shifts and changes in setting and narrative through Edde’s wonderfully dense and shifting prose.
But a novel from the Calcutta-based Seagull Books might still seem like a darkhorse in this race and this is only the second time a book of theirs has appeared on the BTBA long list, though they’ve been publishing translations for thirty years and they rank with New Directions and Dalkey Archive in the numbers of new translations they publish every year. They’re also gaining a lot of traction with indie booksellers—I’ve seen new staff recommendations for their books appear here at Elliott Bay, and all down the west coast at City Lights, Green Apple and Skylight Books. And with good reason: Kite contains a richly rewarding depiction of a character—one who reads, who writes!—going blind that is, by itself, worth the price of the book.
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Chad here. To add a special bit of something to Rick’s write-up, here’s a really fun bit of the interview Seagull Books founder Naveen Kishore gave in Shelf Awareness:
Shelf Awareness: What do you love about books in translation?
Naveen Kishore: The “edginess” of literature different from mine. The “getting-under-the-skin” quality. The sense of dislocation and being “torn asunder.” And the intuitive recognition of humor across cultures!
SA: What do you think is the future of the printed book?
NK: Healthy. More beautifully crafted than ever before. Shine on, you crazy diamond! - Rick Simonson

Quite often, a novel will be described as being unclassifiable. I’m not sure if that label is supposed to be a marketing trick that’s intended to make the product appeal to certain niche audiences, a declaration of how brilliantly different the work is, or a cautionary warning to the casual reader of mass market paperbacks to steer clear. Whatever the intention, Dominique Edde’s Best Translated Book Award longlisted novel Kite fits the bill, and I find myself at a bit of loss when attempting to describe it to others.

Here’s the best I’ve come up with to this point. It’s a novel about a group of people who know that they’re in a novel, some of which are busy struggling with writing their own novels, two of which are in love, one of which is content with his marriage to someone else. Its story spans several decades, is set against the political backdrop of the Middle Eastern climate of constant war, and it was originally penned in the French language.
See what I mean?
The translation itself is devastatingly beautiful. Take, for example, this passage which so wonderfully gets at the heart of the key matter of the novel:
Here it is, confirmed in black and white in the newspaper. And look at the bottom of the page, I quote “Yesterday, a young woman was stoned to death for making a paper plane out of a photo of an Imam.” For those who don’t understand Arabic, a “paper plane” in English is a kite, and what is a kite? First of all, it’s the opposite of a statue, it has the right to go in any direction, to fly, to stop, slow down, eagle-dive, sail, change course, somersault, once, twice, three times, stop upside down, soar again and fly off in the sky, while unseen hand hold the end of its string, that is a kite. It is a paper cloud that crosses boarders, blurs them, pushes them back, it is the wandering ghost of all that we have lost as a result of being afraid of everything and accepting everything. The kite is a novel, it goes here and there not knowing where it goes.
Equally impressive are the smaller bursts of brilliance that sprinkled throughout the text. Take for example:
Freedom is mediocre compared with lunacy, which is so much more luminous and so much more obscure.
Yet for all of Kite’s striking prose, succinct or otherwise, there’s something strangely perplexing about the way all of its pieces come together. What should be deeply meaningful moments between intimate characters feel lackluster at best, which is a difficult because so much of the novel depends on the successful selling of the love story at hand. It isn’t necessarily a failure, but the fact that the characters are so self-aware, that they know right from the get go that they are pawns being strategically placed on someone else’s game board, is never far from the reader’s mind.
It’s fair to say that Kite is one of the more interesting entries I’ve come across on the BTBA longlist. It may even be the best translated of the bunch. Ultimately though, for me, the delight of reading this one came from spotting brilliant fragments of striking language that are embedded in an otherwise lackluster narrative. It’s a shame, because it felt as though the novel it wanted to soar, but ended up grounded instead by the very constraints that were supposed to free it. - Aaron Westerman



Excerpts:
'What is a novel?' Mali asked her students.
It was October 1968, shortly after she and Farid had broken up for the first time. She was teaching French that year at a government school in Beirut. She had been given a class of sixteen-year-olds, about sixty boys, most of whom were behind in their studies and had only a smattering of French since they were sitting their baccalaureate in Arabic. Their replies, hesitant at first, came thick and fast. Mali jotted them down. Running on from each other, they read as follows: the novel's a story that's long and wide; it's life but in a book; it's like my uncle who married my aunt without asking for permission; if you observe life carefully, the novel is all around us; it's a story that has a beginning and no end; it's an Arabian Nights; it's when love is a river that meets a dam; I've got a novel, Miss, it begins with some Russians; the novel is full of things that happen at the same time and we don't know why; a novel is so sad it makes you laugh; well, my father says that our defence minister is a novel all by himself; if a novel begins, there's no more rest, that's it; what happened between Abdo and Mohammed the day before yesterday's a novel; the novel's for the French, we Arabs have poetry; Miss, is my sister's death a novel? everyone has novels, there's no need to die; only Allah writes novels; I want to write a novel about Palestine, so that it stays somewhere.
One boy sitting at the back of the class had said nothing. Gazing out of the window, his arms folded, he looked not so much absent as irritated. Yet he was the only one who spoke French. Mali addressed him. 'Ali, I haven't heard anything from you. What is a novel?' He resisted. She insisted. 'It's a story someone tells,' he replied eventually, 'that's all.' 'Give us an example,' she answered, expecting him to give a book title and the name of an author, but that was not how he understood the question. This is what he replied:
It was a winter's day. The sun came and went. The clouds grew bigger. The whole sky was like a stormy sea. Abu Sami pushed his orange cart shouting,'Ten piastres a kilo!' The street was empty, no one could hear him but he paid no attention. He shouted, 'Ten piastres a kilo!' and dreamt of a woman he loved. The hands on the clock were turning, daylight was fading and the clouds were growing darker and darker still. The rain began to fall, the dust turned to mud and Abu Sami's dream came and went, like the sun, its light vanished, he could hardly see the face of the lady he loved. Abu Sami no longer had the strength to shout,'Ten piastres a kilo!' He trundled behind his orange cart in silence. Several oranges rolled off but he didn't pick them up. Just then, an American car pulled up beside him and a lady sitting in the back wound down her window to buy five kilos of oranges. He put the fifty piastres in his pocket and went home with his oranges. A neighbour was waiting for him on his doorstep. He said, 'I have bad news for you, Abu Sami, the dancer is dead.' The dancer was the woman who had been going round and round in his head while he walked. Her name was Camelia. He'd seen her once at Ain el Mraisseh in a cabaret called Chéri. Only once but he loved her.
'There, that's a novel,' grunted Sami, shrugging his shoulders. And as Mali, smiling, wrote down the closing sentences in a notebook, he added in a more conscious, even solemn, tone, 'Once is enough to kindle a dream and a cloud is enough to snuff it out but, for the person telling the story, the dream and the cloud can last a thousand years. The novel doesn't move like an ordinary watch, its hands can stop for an hour on a minute and for a second on twenty years. It's a machine that can gobble a life in two pages.'

What wouldn’t I give to what?
To spare you, suggested her father. To live, Jane said. To not die, said Pierre. To see you grow up, wrote Mademoiselle. To know that you were loved, said Farid. Worshipped, adored, revered, he had added, biting her shoulder. ‘Ouch! You’re hurting me! Look . . .’ she replied. They were in London, in a hotel room. She was holding a photograph of her mother as a child, on the back of which was written: ‘Claire de l’Orme, Loulans-les-Forges, 1920’. A little girl with long black hair stood with her right knee resting on an upturned round-backed chair with spindle legs. She was leaning forward, both hands on the back of the chair, gazing at the photographer who was probably saying, ‘That’s perfect, now don’t move.’ Wearing a white silk and lace dress and white ankle boots with leather buttons down the side, she countered the absurdity of the tableau with a hint of a smile that caught Farid’s attention. ‘She had a sense of irony too,’ he said, glancing at his watch and running his hand over his cheek. ‘Have you seen the time? I’ve got an appointment in twenty minutes and I haven’t even shaved.’ Sitting on the edge of the bed, Mali’s gaze became fixed, almost vacant. She was suddenly prey to the depressive mood that overcame her each time she lost her grip on reality. It was as if a screen rose up between real life and her fantasies. Pulled by these two worlds which drained rather than nourished each other, she would enter into a state of torpor which people mistook for indolence or inattentiveness. But in reality it was a form of mental confusion camouflaged by enormous pride. She was the centre of a world that she simultaneously wanted and did not want.
Sometimes hesitant and capricious like the last embers of a fire, sometimes bright like a bouquet of wild flames, Mali was fire and wind but lacked fuel. Living both emptied her and filled her with joy. The weaker her ego became, the more she flew to its aid, flattered it, praised it, and doing so, destroyed it. She could have moved mountains were she not constantly creating obstacles, but as the author of and hostage to this vicious circle her reasoning was no use. In short, she suffered from a surfeit of life and, at the same time, a lack of existence. Too sensitive to be nasty and too irritable to be nice, she was at once impatient, arrogant, attentive and amusing, inventive, unproductive, quick-tempered and generous. She was excess itself. Always ready to desist, give up, resign, she still demanded the impossible: fervour without faith, duration without commitment, luxury without comfort. Having to choose that moment of decision was her worst enemy. It was only when she could no longer endure it, when destiny took over, that she gave the best of herself. ‘She has the soul of a tigress in the body of a sparrow,’ her friend Lulwa said of her. Farid smiled. ‘Curious, I would have said the opposite. I would have said the soul of a sparrow in the body of a tigress.’
Mali’s physique reflected her character. She was one of those women who is barely recognizable from one photo to the next. The slightest detail detracted from her charm, the slightest detail restored it. It was the same with humour. One minute she had it and the next she had none. She spent it all, like money. She was sometimes graceful, sometimes quite ordinary. Her face was dominated by her black eyes, which in turn were dominated by her moods. At her best moments, her eyes radiated a light that softened the irregular angles of her nose and chin. When she was down, the light was no longer there; her features lost their harmony, hardened, struggled to smile. Then, she would look abandoned and disconnected. When she forced herself to smile, she smiled the best. At those moments, a look of benign irony filled her eyes—a combination of distance and presence. For the rest, she had a certain allure, she was slim and moved with ease and confidence. She was not feminine by nature but very much so when she wanted to be. She learnt femininity as if learning a language by correspondence, copying from memory what she recalled of her mother. Joy suited her but, as time went by, it abandoned her. She would actually say ‘I miss joy’ as if speaking of a friend who had died. She was in fact tragic, and more willing to be so than she would ever admit. Intrusive and soft at the same time, her voice lent itself as readily to love as to anger; it was as tempted to take power as to relinquish it to the first comer with an exhausted sigh. ‘What a pity,’ she would say to herself, ‘I always thought that I was ugly, and now that it’s too late I realize that there were times when I was beautiful.’
In fact, she had two images of herself: one likeable and the other, not. And strangely, it was the unlikeable one that helped the other survive. Her insight was the bane of her intelligence, which was stormy, quick and rebellious, always personal but often uncontrollable; she saw the world in abrupt visions which would collapse into confusion the minute she tried to arrange them. Throughout her life, the urge to write would be interrupted, inspiration always deserting her, leaving her beached on the shore of words. Only her love letters were spared disaster. It was here, away from the world, between the four corners of a sheet of paper that her heart and her head were not in conflict over words.
She chose the opening words like a dress from her wardrobe, to please Farid and as her mood dictated. This was the moment she loved best, the moment when anything was possible. ‘Love,’ she wrote, or ‘My love’, ‘dearest love’ or ‘My Farid, my one and only, my heart, my life’. She would sometimes resort to phrases in Arabic; above all, she loved the letters that ran from right to left, from top to bottom. When she wanted a light, summery touch Mali opted for English: ‘My love, my dearest love, my dearest you,’ and towards the end: ‘My giant, my soul, my me …’and in the very last:‘Farid’.
As soon as she began a sentence, she would experience the anxiety of a child facing a stormy sea. Her desire swelled as the waves approached. She knew he liked detail and that his eyes would race as he read. And so she began by giving him details. She stared at the top of a palm tree outside her window and waited for the image that would emerge. ‘Guess who I saw this morning when I went to pick up your letter from our friend Sima?’ She described cousin Marwan, reproduced the conversation they had had, adding that he had lost three hundred Egyptian pounds at the Beirut casino, that his wife was expecting a baby, that he was predicting war between Iraq and Kuwait . . . Only then, as if having completed a chore, would she finally dip her toe in the water, ‘If only you knew how much I miss you,’ she wrote. And then, impatient, she would rush headlong into a wave, adding, ‘I can no longer live without you.’ She read over what she had written, crossed out the sentence, crumpled up the sheet of paper and began afresh. She did not want him to feel guilty. She did not want to lose him. Her obedient hand rewrote the date at the top of the page, on the right, hesitated for a moment—everything could still change—and was off again. The letter usually developed according to the music she was playing. She’d inform him in passing that she was listening to a Bach suite or cantata, a Chopin prelude, a Mozart sonata, and at once got carried away in a burst of wild lyricism, forgetting, as she wrote, that her words would be read without the accompanying music. Then the body took on substance, slowly, bashfully, in parts, propped up by full stops and commas. ‘Your eyes, your forehead, your nose, your mouth, your ears, your neck . . .’ She planted thousands of kisses on the page that would secretly draw Farid’s hands to her face, her breasts, her belly, her delighted, anguished, begging, tearful sex. All those censored words pushed for other paths. ‘As I write to you, I envy the paper, the pen, the corner of the table your hand touches.’ She knew what he wanted to hear as if he were there, the combination of angel and devil, the surge of feeling, the embraces, his need for reassurance, her arms embracing his sleeping body, the wind in his folded wings. Absence became a means of invasion, capture and possession. A kingdom. Farid possessed her, she bewitched him. He worshipped her, devoured her, bound her to his life, she drowned him in love. Her letters were written in a generous and hurried hand, in blue ink on exquisite Lalo paper.
When the time came to draw the curtains, she rediscovered the palm tree, the white dust of Cairo, and with a pang she made up something, which, no sooner written, either thrilled her or made her cry. Sometimes she signed ‘M’ and sometimes ‘Fidelio’ after the first opera they had seen together, during which he had written in English on the slender side of a cigarette packet: ‘You are mine.’

translated from the French by Ros Schwartz