September Not Fiction Book Discussions

With our next three books, we will explore our complicated relationship with the idea of home, family, and self, with great loss and the bittersweet compensation of self-knowledge that sometimes follows.

House of Stone: A Memoir of Home, Family, and a Lost Middle East by Anthony Shadid is the story of the author's quest to rebuild his great-grandfather's home in Marjayoun, Lebanon, devastated by war and abandoned by generations who have emigrated to America, and to rebuild his sense of self, also devastated by what he has witnessed as a foreign correspondent reporting on war in the Middle East and the pain of a divorce and estrangement from his daughter precipitated by his work.

This home is both literal and metaphorical. Shadid tells us at the beginning of his narrative that the Arabic word bayt "literally translates as house, but its connotations resonate beyond rooms and walls, summoning longings gathered about family and home. In the Middle East, bayt is sacred. Empires fall. Nations topple. Borders may shift or be realigned. Old loyalties may dissolve or, without warning, be altered. Home, whether it be structure or familiar ground, is, finally, the identity that does not fade." Shadid blends political and cultural history of the Levant, the story of his family's resettlement in America, humorous anecdotes of his efforts to be integrated into the fabric of Marjayouni life and find reliable, competent construction labor, and occasional, searing recollections of the dangers of his reporting work and the pain of his nuclear family's disintegration. The complex narrative moves back and forth in time, and, as Kathryn Schultz notes in her New York Magazine review, "The effect is that of a film simultaneously projected forward and backward: the house falls apart and comes together at the same time." So, too, does Shadid, in the familiar but compelling arc of the memoir of personal recovery.

Tragically, Shadid died on February 16, 2012, while on assignment in Syria, just a month before the scheduled release of House of Stone. In April 2011, Shadid was featured on the NPR talk show On Point. A caller questioned why Shadid kept taking personal risks to cover conflicts in the Middle East: "I kind of wonder if it's irresponsible of you. Why would someone put themselves in such a situation?" Shadid agreed that this was "a perfectly legitimate question. I felt that if I wasn't there, the story wouldn't be told." An interviewer for World Literature Today asked Shadid a similar question: "Is your biggest personal conflict celebrating creation amid reporting destruction? Because that's sort of the premise of the book, that you're building this home, something of a monument to creation, in a place so full of conflict." Shadid replied, "What I saw the house as, and I say this to my wife when she asks why the house is so meaningful to me: It's the only thing I've created in this world. And because there's so much death, so much destruction, so much carnage, I have to ask: Is there a way to stop loss? Is there a way to reclaim what was lost? I still don't know the answer. We have to think of it in a different way, and I think that's where imagination comes in. It's the question that haunted me going into this experience, and still sticks with me. How do we stand loss? Maybe it doesn't really matter? I don't know. If we can imagine identities that are transcendent, or imagine communities that are transcendent, I wonder if loss even matters. I'm not sure if that's the case or not, but that's kind of how I came to it in the end. I think this matters not just for Marjayoun, or my life, or this house. I think that matters to the Arab world."

What do you think of Shadid's quixotic quest to rebuild his great-grandfather's house in a dying town in the heart of a war zone? To find a sense of family and community even though his dangerous work as a foreign correspondent caused his own to disintegrate? Would your response to his book be different if he were still alive and actively reporting?

We hope you'll join the discussion: Tuesday, September 3, at 6:30 p.m. at Main Library; Thursday, September 19, at 11:00 a.m. at West Ashley Library; or here on the blog.