The Lord by Soraya Antonius

In this stunning portrait of Palestinian life before the Nakba, a young man gains renown as a magician of a revolutionary sort—meanwhile evading the British colonialist forces who seek to destroy him and the resistance he represents.

A reporter posted to Lebanon in the early 1980s, covering the Israeli invasion of the time, encounters Miss Alice, an English missionary who is nearing the end of a long life in the region. With memories that go back to World War I and the start of the British Mandate in Palestine, she unfolds the strangely puzzling story of one of her students, Tareq, a talented and charismatic youth who, on leaving school, took up the unlikely calling of a traveling magician. Moving from village to village, from country to city, Tareq observes the growing discontent with the colonial authorities that will erupt in a full-scale rebellion in 1936. He observes; perhaps he contributes. Among the people, he has come to be known as "the lord," while his comings and goings have also attracted the attention of Challis, the ruthless British police chief. A manhunt begins.

The Lord re-creates the extraordinary richness and vivacity of Palestinian life before the Nakba, offering a view, at once panoramic and intimate, of Palestinian society and colonial occupation. A clear-eyed examination of a chapter of British colonial history that laid the groundwork for conflicts that continue to rack the Middle East, The Lord remains as timely and telling now as ever.

REVIEWS

"The Lord tunnels into the lost worlds of Palestine before Israel, not as counterfactual or nostalgia. It rebuilds those worlds as text, through breathtaking descriptions . . . Antonius’s characters are as hopeless as they are familiar to today’s readers. But her settings do something more. They root into the soil. They expose ancient forms of coexistence. They reclaim the possibility of beauty, translatable in all directions." —Kaelen Wilson-Goldie, 4Columns

"The Lord combines history, political analysis, spycraft and misguided love affairs, shrouding all these elements in le Carré-like grey. Antonius is a sophisticated writer and expects us to keep up with her . . . Antonius’s narrator writes from a Lebanon reeling from the Sabra and Shatila massacre. With this reissue, the book’s resonance gains another dimension." —Chris Power, The Observer

“Soraya Antonius has an excellent ear for the gulf that separate two cultures, the rulers and the ruled. But the greatest delight of her book is her vivid evocation of great cities like Jerusalem and Jaffa, glories of a vanished Palestine, tragically doomed amid its olive groves.” —The Standard

PRODUCT DETAILS
Paperback
Publisher: NYRB Classics
ISBN: 978-1681379579
Pages: 248