The book “Origins by Amin Maalouf embraces his family history which he has written over the period of four years in Havana, Beirut and in Paris where he lived.
It is an astonishing book about ancestral homeland, origins, background, inheritance, and belonging. It is a book about his own family history from the mountains of Lebanon to the plantations of Cuba. But with the journey of his family history, Maalouf takes the reader to a journey in Lebanon from the Ottoman Empire to the secular and modernizing Kamel Ataturk. The novel envelops around the lives of his grandfather Botros, the rebel who stayed home and invested his free-thinking secularism and his great Uncle Gebrayel who left Lebanon at the age of 18 and made his fortune in Cuba.
Although the memoir is complex, Maalouf focuses on the issues of migration. In ‘Origins’ he takes the reader to the notion of identity and the questions surrounding heritage. The individual’s sense of place, belonging, state, region, language, family, religion, business, poetry, and love is high in thought and brings the reader constantly in contact with the meaning of all these issues.
As Amin Maalouf reveals himself in this novel and goes to a historical investigation of his past, each reader will mirror his/her own family history and enjoy shifting between the past and the present while reading this wonderful book.
Simply this novel is a masterwork.
Copyright Semra Eren Nijhar – All rights reserved
Semra Eren-Nijhar 
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