The 3 best books by Amin Maalouf

On more occasions than we think, literature is a great way to get closer to any culture. Without a doubt, the ethnocentrism of each nation or region ends up monopolizing our notion of what the world is. And that's where the work of a writer like Amin maaloufIlluminated and at the same time brimming with humanity, he performs a primary task.

Maalouf is Lebanese, just on the other side of the Mediterranean, a country whose history ends up being a shared development among all the Western peoples who ended up making up our current world. Only that no matter how close we consider that East, on many occasions we consider it as something foreign, when the truth is that similar religious and political conflicts between Muslims and Christians have also been experienced there, only many centuries after what happened in Spain, of course.

So, within the latent conflict in countries like Lebanon, an author like Amin maalouf, with a heterodox cultural load within his own family, he has been able to gather realities and particular impressions, history and current affairs, ending up by offering a rich and absolutely revealing bibliography on the reality of our world, this compendium of cultures and beliefs that never find complete shared accommodation, to put it euphemistically.

Top 3 recommended books by Amin Maalouf

Lion the african

Talking about Maalouf is for many to evoke this, his great work. A novel that seems to adopt an air to the myth of the wandering Jew but extracted from the most faithful reality contrasted with historical documentation.

Because Hasan is the wandering Muslim, born in Granada around 1488 and a restless cultural pilgrim, capable of leaving testimony of his passage through very distant places in Africa and throughout the Mediterranean. Maalouf prepares for Hasan a literary life even richer than the one that nourished his legend.

And at the same time we are made to see the levels of wisdom and power that this character came to treasure. In the skin of León the African we contemplate great moments in the real history of that world epicenter that was the Mare Nostrum in those years, of the conflicts and the difficult balance between so many peoples bathed by the shores of the sea...

The Rock of Tanios

In some way, when Maalouf begins to write a historical novel, what he really does is narrate a fairly faithful chronicle of events that may have been overlooked in the most notable chronicles of the times but that, nevertheless, regain new vigor in the author's pen.

Historical fictions almost always resort to real events as a necessary setting for the narration of interesting intra-stories infused with certain events. In the case of this novel, although it is true that it fits the Lebanese legend of Tanios, a young man who achieves the quality of a hero by his firm will to liberate his people.

The novel finally also points to a reconciling intention in a Middle Eastern space where the clashes between religions continue to be a focus of great problems.

The disoriented

In this novel focused on current times, Maalouf extends his conscientious intention and his reconciliation will, in addition to his undeniable cultivating result on the reality of a Middle East focused on Lebanon but extending to many other regions of the area.

The protagonist of this novel is Adam, a kind of essentially alter ego of the writer himself. Since his retirement in Paris, Adam decides to return one day to his land to accompany a good friend who is already dying. The return supposes that natural clash between what Adam is today and the evocation of his past, as well as the impact of sharing his life with the rest of his youth friends. Much is glimpsed of the writer himself, of his perspective loaded with many impressions, from guilt to lucidity, from nostalgia to the assumption of the destiny of his family and his people.