Moving the Palace

April 10, 2017
Samuel Ayyad, a Lebanese Protestant, becomes obsessed with transporting a disassembled palace across the Middle East in this charming and gently humorous historical novel. In the early 20th century, Samuel moves to Sudan to seek wealth using his language skills to interpret for the British army. While traveling to shore up British dominance of the region, he meets a merchant trying to find a buyer for the small palace he has purchased, taken apart, and strapped to the backs of a caravan of camels. Taken with this project, Samuel becomes a partner and uses British army gold to grease enough local gears to avoid violence and theft. As the caravan drivers and even the merchant lose faith in the quest, Samuel decides to take the palace back home to Lebanon, only to be stymied by the outbreak of World War I. Majdalani’s writing sparkles as he relates Samuel’s picaresque and often funny schemes to get back to Lebanon through hostile territory. The narrator, Samuel’s grandchild, periodically interjects to offer just enough history of the region to keep less familiar readers on track. Those looking for an enjoyable and brisk literary adventure will be very satisfied.

April 1, 2017

Winner of the Francois Mauriac Prize from the Academie Francaise, this utterly charming and, yes, moving novel takes us on a journey through early 1900s Sudan, Egypt, and the Arabian Peninsula that unexpectedly ends in sweet victory. Unlike other Lebanese emigrants of the era, Samuel Ayyad leaves home not for the United States or even Zanzibar but for the dusty and difficult Sudan, where he serves as translator for a wily and possibly batty British colonel facing rebellion. Samuel, from a distinguished literary family of Lebanese Protestants, is occasionally irked by how he's treated but does his job well enough to be entrusted with a message and eventually bags of gold for sultan Qasim Wad Jabra, whom the British are wooing. The gold in particular comes in handy when Samuel encounters compatriot Shafik Abyad, who has purchased a palace in Tripoli. Shafik intends to sell the palace, but it has no local bidders, so he breaks it down and loads it up on the backs of hundreds of stalwart camels and wanders the desert, intent on selling the palace only in its entirety. Samuel and Shafik quickly join forces, and the result is a victory of human ingenuity and a joyous picaresque. VERDICT Beautiful fun that also gives a deeper sense of Middle East history.

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