Nada Awar Jarrar’s second novel arrives as beautifully and temptingly wrapped as a box of Lebanese sweets, the lovely pink and rose jacket photograph of the sea reminding those of us who spent time in Beirut just why we miss that city. The book looked fantastic on my coffee table and is very short – just over two hundred pages in BIG type – making it an ideal candidate for a travel companion.

Nada Awar Jarrar

A delicately and simply written story is laid out in five sections – our almost-heroine Aneesa grows up in a privileged family with a summer home in the mountains and apartment in Beirut, a lovely but dreamy child, touched by magic and surrounded by beauty and love which Nada Awar Jarrar wonderfully brings out in careful images – the tenderness of nature in the mountain village, the way coffee is prepared in the family house. With the death of her father, Aneesa’s troubled relationship with her brother Bassam becomes tragic when – involved in sectarian politics – he is kidnapped during the Civil War. Never heard from again, she writes letters in his name to her distraught mother, Waddad, and flees to London. There she meets a fellow Lebanese émigré, Salah – who seems at first a lover but whom we discover later is (merely?) a soul mate, much older than she – and after an obligatory affair with a European who means nothing to her, she gains the perspective that allows her to return to Beirut, her mother, and her mother’s incipient nervous breakdown (convinced that the dead Bassam is once more returning to her in the body of a chance-met child). Salah dies in exile in London and his son, Samir, distraught with grief, returns to Lebanon where he and Aneesa (in the shadow of more conflict – presumably the 2006 summer bombings of Beirut) begin a careful love affair.

Nada Awar Jarrar is clearly a writer of great sensitivity. In her painstaking avoidance of the obvious, both in her style of writing and in the way she presents her characters’ stories, she often becomes mystifying as well as magical. When this works well, the effect is truly like the “dreams of water” of the title – fragments from one section of the book slip and flow into stories from another, such as the heart-breaking moment when Waddad confesses her crushing guilt, her awareness that her son made no attempt to escape from his killers so that she, who unwittingly let them into the house, would not be harmed: “we live and falter…in recollection and regret” (p.49). Images suddenly become fixed with strong emotion to delight and surprise us (“I am in love with all this, Salah thinks to himself in astonishment”) However, the effect is sometimes intensely frustrating because the most important story in the book, the one which the reader most cries out for, is not always that of Aneesa but of the abandoned child, Ramzi, whom Waddad finds in an orphanage and becomes convinced is her son reincarnated. This immensely touching story brought tears to my eyes and brings up in an exquisitely elegant way the complex ideas behind exile and family, and the loss of the past in order to embrace a future – as when the boy says, with grim courage, “I will come and be her son.” (p.59)…but Jarrar doesn’t allow us to focus on the story, alas, and Ramzi is whisked away before we learn enough.

Equally, we never do find out any of the critical details that might affect our understanding of the story – no politics or religious issues intrude (people visit a shrine, but we never know if it is Druze, Christian or Muslim), and when we do see wider gestures such as Bassam’s defiant words to his captors on the eve of his (presumed?) execution – “This is my country”! – these merely stress the role of the personal will and personal feeling of Jarrar’s characters, rising up to obliterate the possibility of any outside world or engagement for them. Charming but frustrating, this approach stops us from caring more about these damaged souls, even though her characters seem intensely real. The London locations are equally watery, shifting like rain, reminding us, in many ways, of Hanan al Sheikh’s “In London”.

“Dreams of Water” will appeal to a wide Western readership precisely because it is so blank, so inwardly focused, and because it makes no attempt to draw uncomfortable lessons or to show responsibilities for any of the vast events that overshadow its characters’ lives. This surely can be a criticism, as can a feeling sometimes that the text as been too heavily edited, where some of the conversations do not sit naturally on the ear (“I was born here but my mother is French and I went to a German school, hence the languages. I studied translation at University and here I am.” P.93) However, it is also a charming and subtly optimistic work, and is often lyrical and lovely – gradually, we see two mirroring stories of loss and adoption as Waddad and Aneesa lose their male relatives and adopt the young Ramzi, and Samir and Salah lose their female relative and adopt the traumatized but radiant Aneesa. For all its deliberate refusals to engage the reader, this remains a fine work about the simple pleasures and the deep virtues, such as love, that redeem the most difficult of times.