Tenderness, emotion, and a quiet melancholy suffuse this book, in which friendship and hatred, life and death chase and give way to each other.
The story of Nassim, the book's young protagonist, unfolds almost in whispers, with a fairy-tale quality that makes us feel at home in Lebanon: children play there too, green meadows stretch there, sweet mountains rise, vast oceans stretch to the horizon...
Then everything vanishes. War, bombs, hatred have erased almost every living trace of that happiness. But they cannot erase memory—memory that lives in the hearts of men, memory that brings color to dark landscapes, to shadowed skies, to the cold walls of the orphanage where Nassim, "doubly orphaned," is confined. Memory that becomes, at night, despair and anguish and ghosts. His only light is his friendship with Jad, who lost his mother. This light, to which Nassim clings at first without comfort, becomes his only reason to live, to love, to speak.
In the voices of these two orphaned children, we hear that "love is the light of the world," that one cannot survive without light.
The narrative also contains some psychological reflections that occasionally seem to come more from the adult narrator than from the child himself.
This book reads easily and teaches us to love despite everything, to refuse hatred and violence.
Sometimes it helps to follow the path of hope walked by others in difficult circumstances; in doing so, we learn not to dwell too long on our own suffering and to open ourselves to sharing it with others.
The translator's choice to preserve Lebanese words and expressions is felicitous, bringing vibrancy and flow to the narrative.— Vittoria Terenzi, 1989
Sometimes it helps to follow the path of hope walked by others in difficult circumstances; in doing so, we learn not to dwell too long on our own suffering and to open ourselves to sharing it with others.