FICTION/Tale Of A Certain Orient: Emilie, a courageous family matriarch who has borne her many sorrows with dignity, is about to die. Her family and friends await the impending loss and have arrived to take their places in the lamentation, or have they? This is a subtle, beautiful and melancholic novel, steeped in memory; its wonder, its burdens and its many secrets.
A granddaughter has returned to say goodbye to the woman who most shaped her life, or at least her understanding of what life amounts to - a telling gesture, a family myth.
Early in the narrative, Hatoum, a storyteller with an artist's eye and a philosopher's soul, makes it clear that his narrator, a self- described "passive observer" has undertaken a journey that is far more complicated than a farewell. She may be preparing her goodbye to her grandmother, but she is also directing her impressions, observations and discoveries to the brother she has not seen for a long time. Our narrator soon emerges as a troubled sleep walker, trapped by vivid images and ghosts that have not yet set her free and, as the narrative unfolds, appear increasingly unlikely to ever fully release her.
She recalls the doomed child, a possible half sister, Soraya, a deaf mute whose world was contained in her apparent obsession with a loudly ticking clock with a noise that "suddenly fell down around you like thunder". This formidable clock assumes a personality of its own. "I remember from a very young age watching Soraya sit impassive, before that big black thing, just as it was about to announce midday . . . The big black clock was the only thing in the whole house that Soraya Angela worshipped."
Set in Manaus, a town in the heart of the Amazon, it is the story of a family cursed with its many stories, resentments and angers, who must also deal with being Lebanese emigrants infiltrating a closed society. Not only do the individuals battle with their personal demons, there is the complex tension caused by contrasting cultures. This is a family in which the older members arrived, bringing with them their Arabic tongue, which in time becomes a foreign language their Portuguese-speaking children must learn anew.
Just as Soraya's patient vigils by the family clock remain a major set piece from the narrator's childhood, so too is the little girl's death in a street accident. But it was not only Soraya who loved the eccentric timepiece, Emilie was also besotted with it. Intent on finding answers to share with her absent brother, the narrator believes her quest will be helped by consulting Uncle Hakim, who has also arrived back in Manaus for the leave-taking. He has remained a Levantine and is very much a stranger. The narrator is well aware of his value as "a potential source of secrets". Although arriving after the death, she sees him as a bringer of news. It is he who will reconstruct the story of Emilie's sad life. "I told Uncle Hakim", recalls the narrator, "that I wanted to talk to him away from all the chaos, away from everyone."
Once Hakim begins telling the story, the novel soars into a richly opulent account of the way lives are both shaped and distorted. He also consolidates the two threads that dominate this book, the power of curiosity and the conflicts of memory. Hakim serves an additional purpose, his narrative quickly alerts the reader to the importance of keeping the central narrator, the returning granddaughter, at a respectful distance: exactly how much does she know? How closely does she listen? Does she listen at all?
Elements such as these add to the mystique and artistry of an atmospheric novel that draws you in with the hypnotic force of the emotions that drive it. First published in Brazil in 1989, and in the US in 1994 under the title The Tree of the Seventh Heaven, it is Hatoum's first novel, and predates The Brothers (2000) which was published in an English translation two years ago, and featured on the 2004 IMPAC long list.
Tale of a Certain Orient is a singular achievement, a chamber quartet contained within the covers of a book. At no time does Hatoum seek easy passage by embracing the surreal devices of conventional magic realism. Instead he sustains a formal sense of a world that has passed, of years and lives that evolved and ended, while in the family home Emilie preserved its many objects, individual scents and, most of all, the rituals intended to compensate for her emotional losses.
For English-language readers already impressed by The Brothers, the belated publication of this dauntingly assured, lyric and layered narrative of voices, gracefully orchestrated by a narrator who carries her personal trauma, is an exciting gift. Rich, living and as complex as its characters, this relatively short novel reads as a far bigger saga. The stoic Emilie offers an extraordinary portrait of a woman accepting her lot. Hatoum's grasp of the inconsistencies and relentlessness of memory, as well as the inherent cruelty of families, creates a profoundly textured work that is sophisticated, elegant, unusually vivid and intriguingly convincing.
Eileen Battersby is Literary Correspondent of The Irish Times
Tale of a Certain Orient By Milton Hatoum Translated by Ellen Watson Bloomsbury, 212 pp. £14.99
