Charif Majdalani

Charif Majdalani's novel "Le nom des rois" (Stock, 2025) portrays the childhood of a Beirut boy on the eve of the civil war as a tension between aesthetic escapism and historical horror: While order crumbles outside, the narrator takes refuge in the resonant names of long-gone kings, recording them in notebooks like trophies—an "onomastic trembling" that drowns out reality. At the heart of the narrative is the close friendship with a classmate, the boy's first experiences of love, and the gradual confrontation with political violence that shatters the narrator's imaginary counter-worlds. This genealogical imagination forms the central thesis of the novel: The name, the language, indeed the French-influenced culture itself, create a dazzling substitute world whose beauty, however, is shattered by the violence of history. Majdalani concretizes this rupture in striking images—the scent of old Larousse encyclopedias, the fashionable salons of Beirut, the shimmering mountain landscapes of Massiaf—which are gradually overlaid by the echo of the first gunshots, the disintegration of social rituals, and the loss of first love. Frequently compared to Proust in critical analysis, the novel thus appears as an elegiac diagnosis of a class that lived in the mirror of France and refused to see the catastrophe: The transition from collecting royal names to firing a real weapon marks the end of poetic illusion and the entry into a history that can no longer be narrated, but only suffered.