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Book review: ‘House of Stone,’ a memoir by Anthony Shadid

By Philip Caputo,March 02, 2012

Four prints by the 19th-century Scottish painterDavid Roberts hung in the Beirut apartment that I rented in the early 1970s when I was a correspondent for the Chicago Tribune. Roberts produced them from sketches he’d made during his tours of what was then called the Near East.

One, “Sidon Looking Towards Lebanon,” shows a group of caravanners, garbed in turbans and the baggy trousers known as sherwal, resting beside kneeling camels and tethered horses on the Mediterranean shore. Serene, flooded with light, the scene captivated me, not only because of its artistry but because of the emotion it evoked — nostalgia for a Middle East (as the region is now inaccurately called) that had vanished decades before I got there.

The picture sprang to mind as I read “House of Stone,” Anthony Shadid’s wonderful memoir of the year he devoted to restoring his great-grandfather’s home in the southern Lebanese town of Marjayoun. His symphonic narrative strikes many notes — elegiac, ironic, angry, funny (in a rueful sort of way). But a yearning for the Levant that flourished under the Ottoman Empire runs throughout, a hymn for a world and a time not without tumult but far more civil, gracious and ordered than the blood-dimmed chaos of the present-day Middle East.

Shadid writes that he undertook the project to restore himself after years of chronicling the region’s conflicts left him “stunned by war, and, shockingly, no longer young, or married, or with my daughter, Laila.” He gives a strong impression that he had an even deeper motive than attempting to rehabilitate his soul and rebuild an ancestral home. He was trying to recapture an unrecapturable past, some of which, one suspects, existed as much in Shadid’s imagination as in reality. The house of his great-grandfather Isber Samara, returned to its lost glory, would be a monument to a bygone epoch.

Sadly, Shadid’s splendid account must stand as his monument. The two-time Pulitzer Prize winner and former Washington Post correspondent died last month at age 43 while on assignment in Syria for the New York Times. He was leaving the country on horseback and suffered an acute asthma attack, apparently an allergic reaction to the horses.

His narrative moves along lines of three contrapuntal melodies, each with its own tonal colors. There is a family saga, a lament as Shadid reimagines his family’s life in Lebanon and their eventual displacement to America after the Ottoman Empire collapsed at the end of World War I; an often humorous tale of his effort to rebuild the house, dealing with diva-like craftsmen, quirky relatives, an unstable political situation and town gossips, who whisper that he’s a CIA spy; and there is Shadid’s struggle to reconnect to his family’s history, a kind of pilgrim’s progress toward bayt, which means “house” in Arabic but connotes community, a sense of belonging.

Though a third-generation American, he felt deracinated by the breakup of his marriage and by his itinerant profession. As he writes, “I was a suitcase and a laptop drifting on a conveyor belt.”

Israel’s month-long war with Hezbollah in 2006, which Shadid covered for The Post and which devastated much of Lebanon’s south, seems to have been the inspiration for his rehab project. He found an unexploded rocket in his great-grandfather’s derelict home and came to realize that the house mattered to him: “I wanted it to survive.”

A year later, on leave from the paper, he returned to Marjayoun bearing the psychic and physical wounds of war (he’d been shot by an Israeli sniper in Ramallah in 2002), and some vague architectural plans in his head.

Right away, Shadid makes clear that his story isn’t going to be “This Old House” transplanted to the Middle East. He is going to paint on a much larger canvas.

In elegant prose, he conjures the Ottoman Empire of antiquity, a multilingual, multicultural realm that spanned three continents, unshackled by borders. In Shadid’s somewhat idealized rendering, the Ottoman world was one of dignity, time-honored traditions and grandeur. It was also a world where a poor man with ambition and drive could make something of himself.

Such a man was Isber Samara, a Bedouin determined to “take his place among the families that had looked down on his own” — that is, to become an Ottoman country gentleman. He made a small fortune as a grain merchant, and he built in Marjayoun a villa out of native limestone, with iron-railed balconies and capacious rooms resplendently tiled. Unfortunately, its completion coincided with the empire’s dissolution. The victorious British and French chopped it up into colonies and protectorates whose capricious boundaries eventually demarcated artificial states, giving rise to the modern Middle East — poisoned by toxic nationalisms and riven by sectarian wars, revolts, insurrections.