{"id":390576,"date":"2010-03-04T14:31:00","date_gmt":"2010-03-04T18:31:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blogs.nybooks.com\/post\/426586664"},"modified":"2010-03-04T14:31:00","modified_gmt":"2010-03-04T18:31:00","slug":"slide-show-hakawati-self-portraits","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/390576","title":{"rendered":"Slide Show: Hakawati Self-Portraits"},"content":{"rendered":"

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In \u201cThe Anger of Exile<\/a>,\u201d from the March 25 issue of<\/em> The New York Review, Colm T\u00f3ib\u00edn discusses two recent novels by writers from Lebanon now living in North America. One of them is Rabih Alameddine\u2019s<\/em> The Hakawati, set in a Lebanon that is, according to T\u00f3ib\u00edn, \u201crendered in luscious, luxuriant detail, with an extraordinary sense of felt life both in the present and in the remembered past, as though Bonnard were an abiding spirit here.\u201d But in Alameddine\u2019s novel, T\u00f3ib\u00edn writes, \u201calways there is the legacy of war, like gray or black pigment, both in the narrator\u2019s memory and in the very gaps between buildings, the \u2018shards of metal, twisted rubble, strips of tile, and broken glass\u2019 that are still \u2018scattered across piles of dirt.\u2019\u201d<\/em><\/p>\n

T\u00f3ib\u00edn refers to Alameddine\u2019s writing as an act of \u201cpainting,\u201d and perhaps it is no surprise to learn that\u2014along with storytelling (a<\/em> hakawati is a traditional storyteller)\u2014Alameddine has spent time practicing that art. During a period of about four years in the 1990s, he painted more than 270 self-portraits, \u201choping to become a better painter,\u201d he says, \u201cand contemplating the idea of an immortality project.\u201d Here are some of his paintings; more can be seen on his Web site, rabihalameddine.com<\/a>.<\/em><\/p>\n

\u2014Eve Bowen<\/i><\/div>\n
\n<\/img><\/a> <\/img><\/a> <\/img><\/a> <\/img><\/a>\n<\/div>\n

<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

In \u201cThe Anger of Exile,\u201d from the March 25 issue of The New York Review, Colm T\u00f3ib\u00edn discusses two recent novels by writers from Lebanon now living in North America. One of them is Rabih Alameddine\u2019s The Hakawati, set in a Lebanon that is, according to T\u00f3ib\u00edn, \u201crendered in luscious, luxuriant detail, with an extraordinary […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":4208,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[7],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-390576","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-news"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/390576","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/4208"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=390576"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/390576\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=390576"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=390576"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=390576"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}