A Beautiful Book About Iraq, Once 'A Country of Dreams'
I don't know if you are in the market for some good summer reading, but if you are, I have a recommendation: I just finished a really marvelous book called "Late for Tea at the Deer Palace." Written by Tamara Chalabi, the daughter of the infamous Ahmad Chalabi, it is the incredibly moving story of Iraq's golden days--when the country "confidently embraced the modern world," in Tamara's words--and how that all withered away with the rise of Saddam Hussein and the Iraq War. But the book is more than a history of modern Iraq--it is also the tragic tale of the Chalabi family, and what became of them during country's devastating fall.
I wrote a review of "Late for Tea at the Deer Palace," an excerpt of which appears below:
On a sweltering spring day in Iraq, days after American forces rolled into Baghdad, Harvard-educated historian Tamara Chalabi wandered through an abandoned house searching for a sign of its former occupants. Tamara, the daughter of Iraq’s infamous Ahmad Chalabi, found it outside, where “a life-size stone statue of a deer stood,” she writes. “I knew that my grandfather Hadi had loved that deer as much as his father before him. Someone had beheaded it.”
“You can’t imagine the wonderful life we had in Baghdad, Tamara. I was like a queen,” is the mournful refrain of Chalabi’s late grandmother, Bibi, the lively matriarch who takes center-stage in Chalabi’s spellbinding new family memoir, “Late for Tea at the Deer Palace.” An exile searching for a bygone Iraq, Chalabi brings to life a shimmering country that was once the sophisticated center of the Arab world.
Before the Golden Mosque was bombed at Samarra, before Saddam unleashed his barbaric wrath on the Kurds, and before the carnage of the Iran-Iraq war, Chalabi’s family lived in that abandoned house — “Deer Palace.” This was during Baghdad’s golden days over 50 years ago, when the city was embracing modernity. The “new roads were busy with Chevrolets, Pontiacs, Chryslers, and Buicks,” Chalabi writes. But then, a violent coup forced the Chalabi family into exile and changed Iraq forever.
...
Among the most memorable chapters of the book is “Sugared Almonds and Jasmine,” which captures Hadi and Bibi’s joyful wedding in 1916, during the thick of World War I. Within two years, the Ottoman Empire would crumble, and out of its rubble, a new country — Iraq — would be born, fraught with sectarian tension.
And yet, as Chalabi masterfully tells it, this was a country still full of hope. It was a place where Salima Murad, a Baghdadi Jew, “became the voice of Iraq” — where Bibi, who considered the abaya old-fashioned, showed off her glittering jewels at monthly visits to the royal household. It was a country that in 1957 commissioned Frank Lloyd Wright to build an opera house on the outskirts of Baghdad.
How quickly it all fell away. Wright’s opera house was never built: In 1958, a violent military-led coup overthrew the Hashemite monarchy....
If you're interested in an exotic, glittering portrait of a country--and a family--I couldn't recommend this book more.
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Dec '10
Re: A Beautiful Book About Iraq, Once 'A Country of Dreams'
Thank you for the recommendation, Emily. I'll put it on my list of books to read--which, thanks to Ricochet, has been steadily increasing.
Another excellent book telling a personal story about the Middle East, is Charles M. Doughty's Arabia Deserta.
I can't recommend it enough. The reader is treated to a beautiful tale of travel and danger through Doughty's story. Essentially the book is his diary and his story paints a beautiful and direct picture of the Arabian world of his time.
Mar '11
Re: A Beautiful Book About Iraq, Once 'A Country of Dreams'
I'm not sure if "infamous" is the best word to describe Dr Chalabi. You might call him patriotic, for persuading Mr Bush to liberate Iraq, in an attempt to return to those golden days. Or you could go along with the lefty narrative - "Chalabi lied, people died", or something like that.
Most of the Middle East, including Iran, would like to return to their golden days, but Iraq maybe has the best chance of succeeding - for that, Dr Chalabi deserves some credit, rather than infamy.
Edited on Jul 20, 2011 at 9:31am