Content
- Gertrude Bell and the founding of modern Iraq
- Mesopotamia as a mythical origin: layers of time and superposition of stories
- The colonial perspective and its archaeological foundation
- France in the novel: the absent rival
- The postcolonial historical perspective: the temporality of failure
- The memoir novel as a postcolonial form
- Conclusion: Mesopotamia as a mirror of the present
Gertrude Bell and the founding of modern Iraq
Olivier Guez Mesopotamia (Paris: Grasset, 2024, quoted as MPO).
German: Olivier Guez, The world in their hands, Translated from the French by Nicola Denis (Cologne: Kiepenheuer & Witsch, 2026). 1
Olivier Guez's novel MPO is a historiographical narrative that focuses on the life of the British archaeologist, intelligence officer and colonial official Gertrude Bell (1868–1926). 2 Guez follows Bell from her early travels through the Orient to her pivotal role in the founding of modern Iraq after the First World War. The narrative begins in 1916, when Bell is summoned to Basra to serve the British colonial power in Mesopotamia—the land between the Tigris and Euphrates rivers—as a political expert and intelligence officer. With her rare combination of fluency in Arabic and Persian, extensive archaeological fieldwork, and a wide network of tribal leaders and sheikhs, she becomes the Empire's most valuable civilian advisor in the Middle East.
The book presents a dual narrative: on the one hand, the biography of an extraordinary woman in Victorian and Edwardian England who defies all societal conventions for her gender; on the other, the epic history of British imperialism in the Arab world, the First World War in the Orient, and the colonial re-establishment of the Middle East. Alongside Bell, historical figures such as T.E. Lawrence (Lawrence of Arabia), Winston Churchill, and the Arab Prince Faysal appear. The plot follows Bell through her love affairs—particularly her unrequited, tragic passion for the married Major Dick Doughty-Wylie—through her archaeological expeditions in the Syrian desert, and through the major political negotiations of the postwar period in Paris and Cairo, which ultimately culminate in the drawing of Iraq's borders.
A central structuring motif of the novel is the relationship between the archaic civilizations of Mesopotamia—Sumer, Akkad, Babylon, Assyria—and the modern imperial project that inscribes itself upon the same soil. Gertrude Bell is both archaeologist and colonizer: she excavates the past and fabricates the future. Guez demonstrates how the rhetoric of the British Empire's civilizing mission directly invokes the myth of Mesopotamia as the "cradle of civilizations"—the cradle of humanity, the Garden of Eden, the land of Abraham and Babel. This mythical dimension serves simultaneously as a basis for legitimizing imperial violence and as a mirror reflecting the hubris of the colonizers.
The final third of the novel and the extensive epilogue present a time-lapse of the postcolonial catastrophe: the 1958 coup d'état, which destroyed the Hachimitic monarchy envisioned by Bell and Lawrence; the oil nationalizations; Saddam Hussein's reign of terror; the Iran-Iraq War; the American invasions of 1991 and 2003; the rise of the Islamic State; and the looting of the National Museum in Baghdad—the very museum that Gertrude Bell herself had founded. The final image is symbolically condensed: Gertrude Bell's bronze bust was stolen from the museum and never recovered. The novel concludes with an apocalyptic inventory of the ruins of the colonial project to which Bell had dedicated her life.
Mesopotamia as a mythical origin: layers of time and superposition of stories
The archaic period as a palimpsest
One of the most literarily revealing techniques in MPO is the consistent superimposition of historical layers. Guez constructs Mesopotamia not only as a geographical location, but as a temporal palimpsest – a blank canvas on which millennia of human history overlap and shine through. The narrator already articulates this approach in the prologue with a kind of epic wide-angle perspective:
During the second part of the Dix-Neuvième siècle, the economy is world-class for the first time in the history of humanity. […] a region redeviated the name of the world, comme au temps d'Alexandre le Grand and de César, of the premiers caliphates Arabes, of the routes de la soie.
In the second half of the 19th century, the economy globalized for the first time in human history. […] One region once again moved to the center of the world, as in the time of Alexander the Great and Caesar, the first Arab caliphates, and the Silk Roads.
The word "redevient" is crucial here: the region is once again becoming the center of the world—it already was under Alexander the Great, under Caesar, under the early caliphates. Guez thus sets in motion a rhythm of history that is not linear, but cyclical: powers come and go, all covet the same land, all invoke the same symbolism. This structure has consequences for the interpretation of the imperial project: the British Empire appears not as a historical exception, but as the most recent embodiment of an archetypal pattern.
This superposition manifests itself at the level of the characters' everyday language. When Bell arrives in Basra, the narrator casually notes: "As in Abraham's time, there are neither drivable roads nor railway lines in southern Mesopotamia." 3 The comparison with the time of Abraham shifts British military logistics into a mythical timescale, where the patriarchs of the Abrahamic religions traversed the same landscape. Bell moves through a sacred space where every footprint overlays the traces of mythical prehistory.
This technique is particularly pronounced in the description of archaeological sites. When Bell and Lawrence visit the excavations of Carchemish – the ancient Hittite capital – the narrator reveals a scene from the deepest prehistoric times:
Les fondations d'un palais émergeaient, découvrant des bas-reliefs décorés de monstres ailés et de démons, de prêtres à barbes frisottées and de pretresses charriant des épis de blé, des corbeilles de fruits, a procession, and des gazelles, des chasses aux lions.
The foundations of a palace were uncovered, revealing reliefs decorated with winged monsters and demons, priests with curly beards and priestesses carrying ears of wheat and baskets of fruit, as well as a procession, gazelles and lion hunts.
This archaeological ekphrasis unfolds a world that existed millennia before Bell and Lawrence, yet becomes immediately present to them through the medium of excavation. The "world of wonders" that Guez speaks of—"un pays des Merveilles surgi de la mythologie et des Écritures"—is simultaneously a real historical finding and an imaginary construction in which the expedition participants overlay their own romantic projections of the past.
The mythical topography: Babylon, Babel, Eden
At the heart of the novel's mythical imagination lies Babylon. For the British colonial officials, modern Mesopotamia is inextricably linked to its mythical topography: the land between the rivers is simultaneously the Garden of Eden, the land of Abraham, the birthplace of writing, the site of the Great Flood and the Tower of Babel. This superimposition of sacred and historical meanings lends the colonial project an eschatological dimension.
This aspect is particularly evident in the figure of A.T. Wilson, the convinced colonialist who advocated the annexation of Mesopotamia to the British Empire. For Wilson, the project of colonization was a kind of civilizational salvation.
L'Éden, Sumer, Babylone: régénérer le berceau des civilizations, n'est pas a colonial adventure comme une other. This is an entreprise de rédemption, prométhéenne et sacrée, the apotheosis of the imperial project, which justifies the war, les morts, les sacrifices consentis.
Eden, Sumer, Babylon: The revival of the cradle of civilizations is not just another colonial adventure. It is a Promethean and sacred undertaking of salvation, the culmination of the imperial project that justifies the war, the dead, and the sacrifices made.
The rhetorical structure of this passage is revealing: Colonialism as "prométhéenne et sacrée"—Promethean and sacred—directly instrumentalizes mythology to legitimize imperial violence. The use of the names Eden, Sumer, and Babylon in a single climax merges salvation-historical and ancient-historical references into a single argument: Whoever colonizes Mesopotamia is carrying on the civilizational legacy of all humankind.
Guez allows Bell herself to internalize and engage with this mythology: “It will take a century or two, perhaps a millennium,” she reflects on the colonial project – a measurement in mythical time. But the author ironically distances himself from this logic: The character Bell, who feels “like the Creator midweek” 4, the “sage-femme” (midwife) of a new country, turns out to be the creator of a monster.
The colonial perspective and its archaeological foundation
Archaeology as epistemic appropriation
A central argument of the novel is that, for Bell and Lawrence, archaeology and colonialism are not two separate activities, but are structurally linked. Both practices are based on an act of epistemic appropriation: the archaeologist excavates foreign cultures and makes them the object of Western science; the colonizer maps and administers foreign territories and makes them the object of Western politics.
This entanglement is particularly evident in Bell's characteristic attitude towards the Arab tribes, whom she deeply admires on the one hand and whose languages and cultures she masters, but on the other hand views with the same detachment as the archaeological objects. Even the way she describes her intelligence work is telling:
À Miss Bell de sonder, filterer, séduire, enrôler éventuellement.
It is up to Miss Bell to assess the situation, filter, seduce, and, if necessary, recruit.
The verb "sonder" – to illuminate, to explore – carries an archaeological connotation: one probes the terrain for hidden layers. Bell's probing of people follows the same logic as probing the ground for ancient artifacts: the object of knowledge – be it a Hittite palace or an Arab tribal leader – is measured, cataloged, and made usable for imperial purposes.
Guez also demonstrates how the protagonists' archaeological expertise directly informs their political work. Through their excavations, Bell and Lawrence possess knowledge of tribal structures, water rights, trade routes, and religious practices that have remained unchanged for centuries. This knowledge gives them a structural advantage over the local power elites and the Ottoman officials who had administered the country. Archaeological knowledge becomes power knowledge.
The Germans as competitors: Archaeology as geopolitics
Particularly revealing in this context is the comparison between British and German excavation work, which Guez weaves into the Carchemish episode. Bell first praises the German archaeologists, whom she knew from Assur:
Elle revenait d'Assur, the ancient capitale Assyrienne, que la Société allerande d'Orient était en train d'excaver, and dont les fouilles l'avaient impressionnée. Elle leur signifia qu'ils travaillaient de manière rudimentaire et que leur expertise laissait à désirer comparée à celle des archéologues in all countries.
She had just come from Assur, the former Assyrian capital, where the German Oriental Society was conducting excavations, and whose work had impressed her. She pointed out that they were working in a rudimentary way and that their expertise left much to be desired compared to that of the German archaeologists.
This passage is ironically tinged: Bell criticizes Lawrence and his colleagues for their inferior technical skills compared to the Germans—the very Germans against whom the British Empire would wage war just a few years later. The archaeological competition between the British and Germans in Mesopotamia is not a random scientific rivalry; it reflects the geopolitical competition for the legacy of the crumbling Ottoman Empire. The Baghdad Railway, the German-Ottoman railway project mentioned at several points in the novel as a strategic threat to British interests, is the infrastructural expression of this rivalry.
France in the novel: the absent rival
British-French antipathy as a structural principle
France's role in MPO is one of the novel's most literarily interesting dimensions, precisely because it is portrayed in a multifaceted and ambivalent way. France is never a neutral power in the novel: it is a rival, an enemy, an obstacle, and, in the epilogue, an implicit warning signal.
The antipathy towards France is already palpable between Bell and Lawrence at their first meeting. During their conversation in Carchemish, they immediately find common ground in their aversion:
Des Français, que Lawrence and Gertrude abhorraient l'un comme l'autre. It is available to a young man in France on a bicycle, on the traces of Richard Cœur de Lion. Les châteaux l'avaient enchanté mais il avait gardé des Français une image de boutiquiers et d'avocats, des petits bourgeois blasés terre à terre. Elle les trouvait arrogants et obscènes […].
The French, whom Lawrence and Gertrude both despised. As a young man, he had traveled through France by bicycle, following in the footsteps of Richard the Lionheart. The castles had enchanted him, but his memory of the French was of shopkeepers and lawyers—of jaded, down-to-earth petit bourgeois. She found them arrogant and indecent […].
Guez gives literary form to the stereotypical British image of France: the French as "boutiquiers," as "petits bourgeois," as showcases of moral depravity. This attitude is not merely personal: Bell and Lawrence share "le point de vue de Burke sur la révolution de 1789," that conservative anti-revolutionary sentiment that separates the English political tradition from the French. The aversion to France is thus epistemologically grounded: France represents a different, incompatible conception of politics and society.
Particularly illuminating in this context is Lawrence's remark, which he makes during a meeting with Bell in Basra:
The moment ignites the imagination of the Arabs, and the fair value is poured into the Turcs and renouer with the passé prestigieux grâce à l'Angleterre. Telle estre notre mission, Gertie, et certainement pas celle des Français. It transforms the region into the petaudière. The Entente cordiale is not a break, nous demeurerons rivaux: à terme, l'ennemi en Syrie c'est la France.
We must ignite the imagination of the Arabs and make them understand that, thanks to England, they can free themselves from the Turks and return to their glorious past. That is our task, Gertie, and certainly not that of the French. They would plunge the region into chaos. The Entente Cordiale is only a temporary reprieve; we remain rivals: ultimately, France is the enemy in Syria.
This statement deserves careful analysis. Lawrence here formulates the implicit thesis of the entire novel: the true strategic goal of British Middle East policy is not only the defeat of the Ottomans, but also the containment of French influence. The Anglo-Arab alliance that Lawrence and Bell envision is, from the outset, also directed against France. They invoke the discourse of the "mission"—only England, not France, can help the Arabs reconnect with their "prestigieux" past.
Sykes-Picot and the Paris Conference
Tensions between Great Britain and France reached their peak during the Paris Peace Conference, to which Guez devotes an entire chapter. Clemenceau, Lloyd George, and Wilson appear as three fundamentally incompatible temperaments who, despite shared rhetoric of victory, pursued completely different goals.
Pour Wilson and Lloyd George, Clemenceau is a nain hargneux obnubilé par la revanche. Pour Clemenceau and Wilson, Lloyd George is a girouette cynique, and pour Lloyd George et Clemenceau, Wilson a raseur arrogant qui veut les priver des dividendes de la victory.
To Wilson and Lloyd George, Clemenceau is a grumpy dwarf obsessed with revenge. To Clemenceau and Wilson, Lloyd George is a cynical opportunist, and to Lloyd George and Clemenceau, Wilson is an arrogant bore who wants to deny them the fruits of victory.
These characterizations, which Guez distills from memoirs and historical sources, have the character of a comedy of errors with disastrous consequences. Clemenceau's famous retort to Wilson's Fourteen Points – "God was so humble as to give only ten commandments" – 5 – appears in the novel as a fitting expression of Tigre's Sardinian realism, which contrasts Wilson's idealistic phrases with the cold logic of power politics.
Guez portrays France's demands with a certain ambivalence. On the one hand, they are depicted as imperialistic and hegemonic: France wants "Grande Syrie" based on the Sykes-Picot Agreement, invoking its "civilizing mission in the Levant." On the other hand, France is the country that suffered most during the First World War.
La France est, de all les belligérants, celui qui a le plus souffert. A young Frenchman sur quatre a été fauché, le Nord-Est, industrieux et agricole, ravagé par quatre ans de combat.
Of all the belligerents, France suffered the most. One in four young Frenchmen lost their lives, and the industrial and agricultural northeast was devastated by four years of war.
This formulation forces the reader to make a moral distinction: France's claims are not merely imperialism, they are also reparations, they represent the blood guilt of the other Allies towards the wounded participant in the war. Guez does not allow himself a simplistic condemnation.
French Orientalism as a colonial discourse
When it comes to Arab nationalism, Guez paints a devastating picture of French Orientalism. The Quai d'Orsay's assessment of Arab nationalism is quoted by the narrator with cold irony:
on ne transforme pas une myriade de tribus en tout cohérent […] une révolte de forçats, unie par un désir désespéré d'évasion impossible hors du bagne, du cancer inguérissable de la chair, par le moyen d'une technique guerrière de bandit, sans aucun idéal spirituel commun, menée par un être étranger à toute compréhension de la foi musulmane.
One does not transform a multitude of tribes into a coherent whole […] – a revolt of convicts, united by the desperate desire for an impossible escape from the penal camp, from the incurable cancer of the flesh, by means of banditry and warfare, without any common spiritual ideal, led by a being alien to any understanding of the Muslim faith.
This passage – quoted from the files of the French Foreign Ministry during the war – is a prime example of colonial discourse in Said's sense: The Arabs appear as a homogeneous, primitive mass without political will, as criminals ("forçats"), as religiously incompetent. They "have no understanding whatsoever of the Muslim faith." 6, leads the revolt – meaning Lawrence – and is himself alienated and pathologized by this orientalist perspective.
By presenting this assessment through the narrator without explicit commentary, but placing it in the immediate context of the vibrant Faysal and the charismatic Lawrence, Guez exposes its absurdity through montage of contrasts. This is the novel's subtle literary device: the colonial-discursive text contains its own refutation.
Finally, France plays a modest but significant role in the epilogue. Reflecting on the Iraq she created in one of her last letters, Bell draws an explicit comparison with French policy in Syria:
Peut-être at-elle créé un monstre. Peut-être at-elle divisé pour mal régner, tels les Français en Syria, qui ont détaché le Liban, et gouvernent en s'appuyant sur les franges chrétiennes et alaouites.
Perhaps she created a monster. Perhaps she divided it in order to rule badly, like the French in Syria, who separated Lebanon and now rule with the help of fringe Christian and Alawite groups.
This passage is of great literary and historical significance: Bell compares her own colonial failure with that of the French in Syria. The comparison is self-critical, but also exculpatory—if France did the same thing, Bell's guilt is relativized. But Guez does not leave this relativization uncommented: The parallel between British Iraq and French Syria policies does not confirm Bell's innocence, but rather the structural identity of both colonial projects.
The postcolonial historical perspective: the temporality of failure
The imperial project as a chimera
The novel does not end with Bell's death in 1926, but with a long postcolonial epilogue that traces the history of Iraq to the present day. This epilogue is the heart of MPO's postcolonial argument and its most striking literary device: the acceleration of time.
In just a few pages, Guez summarizes decades of catastrophic failure: the 1958 coup, the massacre of the Hachimite royal family, Saddam Hussein's rise to power, the Gulf War, the 2003 American invasion, and finally, the Islamic State. His conclusion is succinct and devastating:
Depuis l'aube de l'humanité, les conquérants se succèdent en Mésopotamie dans l'espoir de mettre la main sur ses richesses naturelles.
Since the beginning of human history, conquerors have flocked to Mesopotamia, hoping to seize its natural riches.
This formulation echoes the cyclical time structure of the prologue and brings the story full circle: the British Empire is not the final expression of a civilizational project, but rather the penultimate act of an endless cycle of conquistadors. After the British come the Americans – driven by the same motives, employing the same methods, and with the same devastating consequences.
The novel leaves no doubt that the borders of Iraq drawn by Bell were structurally doomed to failure. The three provinces – Basra, Baghdad, Mosul – which were merged into a single state, had no common political identity, no shared history as a unified entity.
Les trois provinces sont rivées à des civilizations rivales, des cosmos divergents, depuis la nuit des temps. Bassora est tournée vers le sud, le golfe Persique et les Indes, Baghdad est liée au monde persan, Mossoul à la Turquie et la Syria. Elles discordant religion and ethnicity.
The three provinces have always been linked to rival civilizations and distinct cultural spheres. Basra faces south, towards the Persian Gulf and India; Baghdad is connected to the Persian world; and Mosul to Turkey and Syria. They differ in religious and ethnic terms.
Bell knows this when she conceals it from her father at dinner in Paris. The novel turns this silence into a moment of moral revelation: the architect of the Iraqi state possessed the knowledge of its structural impossibility and suppressed it. This discrepancy between knowledge and action is the real moral failing that Guez attributes to Bell—not stupidity, but complicity with a system she saw through.
The Stolen Heritage: Museums and Memorial Spaces
The final sentence of the epilogue has a condensed, poetic quality: "Among the stolen works was the bronze bust of Gertrude Bell. It was never recovered." 7 Bell founded the National Museum of Baghdad to preserve the archaeological treasures of Mesopotamia for the Iraqi nation. The museum was looted in 2003, during the early days of the American invasion—while the GIs stood idly by. Bell's bust, stolen from the museum she herself founded, is a symbol of rare poignancy: the colonial subject that unearthed and preserved the past became itself the unearthed and lost object.
Guez adds another layer to this by referring to the destructive fury of the Islamic State:
These fanatical zélotes avaient auparavant dévasté les archéologiques sites, les old monasteries et les ancient mosquées sous leur control, dégradant de manière irrémédiable le patrimoine mondial de l'humanité. The déprédation of the heritage culture of Mesopotamia is available to the premiers during the American invasion in 2003.
His fanatical followers had previously devastated the archaeological sites, ancient monasteries, and historic mosques within their sphere of influence, irrevocably damaging the world's cultural heritage. The plundering of Mesopotamian cultural heritage had already begun in the first days of the US invasion in 2003.
The destruction of archaeological heritage by ISIS is a cruel irony of postcolonial history: The artifacts that Bell and her contemporaries unearthed, scientifically cataloged, and in some cases transported to London or Paris—thus also subjecting them to a form of colonial dispossession—have now been destroyed by another regime of violence. This long arc of destruction connects imperial appropriation with anticolonial fervor: Both end in loss.
Gertrude Bell as a tragic figure in postcolonial literature
Olivier Guez constructs Bell as a profoundly contradictory figure who embodies both the internal logic of the colonial system and its limitations and contradictions. Bell is a feminist and an anti-suffragist, a lover and a loner, an archaeologist and an intelligence officer, an admirer of Arab culture and an enforcer of the British Empire. These contradictions are not a psychological paradox—they are structural contradictions of the colonial project itself.
The final scene of the novel itself – Bell on horseback at the edge of the desert, shortly before her death – sums up this ambivalence: She contemplates the land she has shaped, a land that is both her creation and her deception:
Gertrude contemplates the beauté crue de l'horizon, the pays qu'elle a modelé. […] Son œuvre est achevée: l'Iraq de bric et de broc, multiconfessionnel et pluriethnique, s'étendra du golfe Persique aux montagnes kurdes.
Gertrude gazes at the rugged beauty of the horizon, the land she has shaped. […] Her work is complete: Iraq, a patchwork of diverse, multi-confessional, and multi-ethnic territories, will stretch from the Persian Gulf to the Kurdish mountains.
The expression "de bric et de broc"—pieced together, from scraps and remnants—is Bell's own internal assessment of her life's work. She has sewn a patchwork quilt, and she knows it. There is something tragic and hopeless in this self-awareness: the knowledge comes too late, changes nothing, and saves no one.
The memoir novel as a postcolonial form
Literature between historiography and fiction
Guez explicitly situates his novel in the borderland between historical fiction and historiography. In the appendix, he lists an extensive bibliography ranging from archives and memoirs to scholarly monographs. At the same time, he emphasizes that MPO is a novel—a genre designation that claims to capture truths through fiction that remain inaccessible to history as a discipline.
The literary decision to focus on Bell's internal perspective allows Guez something that historiographical texts cannot achieve: the real-time portrayal of a colonizer's consciousness. We see how Bell experiences, justifies, and represses her contradictions. We see how the imperial subject constructs itself as heroic and necessary—and how this construction gradually disintegrates.
In this respect, MPO, in the sense of Homi Bhabha, is a text that makes the "ambivalence of colonial discourse" visible in literary form: The colonizer is never completely secure in his rule, never fully convinced of his right. The fascination with the Other—the Arab world, the Bedouin way of life—and the domination over him are inextricably linked.
The Silence of History: Gender and Colonialism
Ultimately, MPO is also a book about history's silence towards women. The publisher's motto – "You don't know her, yet she held the world in her hands." 8 – names the feminist concern of the novel. Bell was one of the most powerful figures in the British Empire during a crucial era; yet she has been marginalized by historiography, while Lawrence, Churchill, and Faysal have become myths.
Guez does not uncritically rehabilitate Bell – he points out her flaws, her arrogance, her complicity – but he insists on the injustice of her invisibility. The fact that a woman drew the borders of Iraq and founded a national museum, while male colleagues reaped the rewards, exemplifies the patriarchal system that Bell herself – paradoxically – defended against women's suffrage.
Conclusion: Mesopotamia as a mirror of the present
Despite its wealth of biographical detail, Olivier Guez's *MPO* is a novel about the enduring nature of imperial logic. Mesopotamia, the oldest cultural landscape in human history, functions in the text as a mirror reflecting the present through the past—and vice versa. The novel's cyclical timeline—from Sumer through Alexander, Caesar, the first caliphates, the British Empire, to the American invasion of 2003—makes it clear that the failure of colonial projects is not a historical exception, but rather their structural norm.
France appears in this panorama as a competitor, a mirror, and a warning sign: competing with Great Britain for the same imperial legacy, mirrored in its structurally analogous Syrian policy, and cautionary through its failure, which preceded Bell's own. The Anglo-French rivalry in the Middle East, pursued by Bell and Lawrence with almost personal passion, was ultimately a rival version of the same project—a fact the novel, through its epic distance, makes clearer than any direct accusation.
The stolen bronze portrait of Gertrude Bell is the novel's final image: those who write history can be erased by it. The colonizer who opened Mesopotamia to the British Empire and inventoried its museum treasures vanished from the very museum she founded. The novel's epilogue concludes with a quote from Lawrence:
Les rêveurs du jour sont des hommes dangereux, car ils peuvent agir leur rêve les yeux ouverts, pour le rendre possible.
Today's dreamers are dangerous people, because they can realize their dream with their eyes wide open, in order to make it possible.
Bell and Lawrence were daydreamers: they realized their dream, which for millions of people became the reality of a failed state, decades of violence, and ultimately the Islamic State. Guez's novel is a literary reckoning with this dream: lucid and elegiac, yet without false apologies.
This article is written in German and can be found at https://rentree.de. Automatic translations into English and French are available. English, French.
Notes- In the absence of a German translation, the following translations were made by me, as is customary here.>>>
- See also: Georgina Howell, Gertrude Bell: Queen of the Desert, Shaper of Nations (London: Macmillan, 2006). – Janet Wallach, Desert Queen: The Extraordinary Life of Gertrude Bell (New York: Doubleday, 1996).>>>
- “Comme au temps d'Abraham, il n'y a ni route carrossable ni chemin de fer dans le sud de la Mesopotamia.”>>>
- “comme le creator au milieu de la semaine”>>>
- “Dieu avait eu la modestie de ne prescrire que dix commandements”>>>
- “Etre étranger à toute compréhension de la foi musulmane”>>>
- "Parmi les œuvres volées figurait le buste en bronze de Gertrude Bell. Il n'a jamais été retrouvé.">>>
- “You don't know anything about it, you pour a tenu le world between its mains”>>>
