![]() Botros, who emerges as an ambitious man “plagued. Naturally, the true story proves more intriguing than the legend. No longer content with family lore, Maalouf decides to probe deeper and is heartened to discover that his mother kept a trunk filled with Botros’s writings: “This trunk contained his life, his entire life, haphazardly deposited inside, with the years all mixed up, in the hope that one day a descendant would come along and sort it out, reconstruct it, and interpret it-a task I could no longer shirk from.” Having learned Spanish en route, the brilliant Botros got Gebrayel duly acquitted and promptly returned to Lebanon. Maalouf grew up hearing that his grandfather Botros had sailed to Cuba in order to defend his emigrant brother, Gebrayel, against a lawsuit. Yet the Lebanese writer of such acclaimed novels as Leo Africanus (1986), The Rock of Tanios (1993), and Balthasar’s Odyssey (2000) took inspiration for his latest book from an unexpected question about a Cuban Maalouf, and Origins, a memoir- cum–family history, is the product of the author’s plunge into his Orthodox/Catholic/Protestant clan’s recent past. ![]() ![]() ![]() A chance remark serving as catalyst for a profound journey of self-discovery sounds more becoming of postmodernist author Paul Auster than historical novelist Amin Maalouf. ![]()
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