Author : Alexandre Najjar
Title : L'Ecole de la guerre (The School of War)
Publisher : Balland
Date of publication : 1999.
Edition : 2nd edition after a 1st sold out edition. Translations already published : In German, Arabic, Romanian and Armenian.
The School of War,
Available in English from Telegram Books (translated by Laurie Wilson), 2006 .
" All wars are alike. What I experienced in Lebanon, others experienced in France, in Spain, in Yugoslavia or elsewhere. Yes, all wars are alike, because while weapons change, the men who wage and are subjected to war do not in the least. As a child, I sometimes heard my Uncle Michel talk about "Big Bertha." I thought he was talking about an aunt or a distant cousin. It was not until later - much later - that I understood that he had appropriated the nickname given to an enormous German howitzer during the Great War, so he could talk about the war without frightening us. "Big Bertha"... Eighty years later, on the brink of the third millennium, in a country located on the other shores of the Mediterranean, the same codename, the same ugly war, the same tragedy. When I resolved to return to Lebanon, after a seven-year absence, I was seized by a double sense of anxiety: that of seeing the past catch up with me, and that of being disappointed by the postwar situation. I had left the Country of Cedars after fifteen years of having, with all my strength, resisted a violence that spared nothing. I had frequented the war like one frequents a lady of the night, had drained my cup to the last dregs. Once peace had been re-established, I had decided to go elsewhere for a breath of fresh air, as if, my mission accomplished, I suddenly felt the need to clear my mind, to forget the drama I had endured, under another sky. The Lebanese civil war was an unbearable nightmare for me, but was also - how could I deny it? - an excellent schooling in life's lessons. Hemingway said that "any war experience is priceless for a writer." I would like to believe that. Without the war, I would have been another man. All my life, I will undoubtedly regret not having had a peaceful childhood (I was eight when the war broke out, twenty-three when the guns were silenced) and having often seen death from too short a distance. But these regrets, these trials, have given me a new understanding of happiness."
After seven years of voluntary exile, the narrator returns to Beirut where he is reunited with his family and friends. The past quickly catches up with him. He re-lives his childhood, then his adolescence, during the war that ravaged his country. In a tone that alternates between seriousness and irony, he recalls events that are tragic or comic, atrocious or moving: the esthetics of bomb shells, snipers, summer vacation, the Swiss-cheese city, long-distance love, waiting in long lines, the soccer World Cup, the taking of hostages, bomb shelters, the radio... Alexandre Najjar shares a very moving narrative about the Lebanese civil war.
