THE REFUGEE OCEAN

Two refugees struggle to build new lives.

As its title suggests, this novel is concerned with refugees. On one side, there’s Naïm Rahil, a 14-year-old piano prodigy from current-day Aleppo whose left hand is mangled by shelling. On the other, there’s Marguerite Toutoungi, born in 1925, the middle daughter of an elite Beirut family that made its fortune from tobacco. While her parents hope to marry her off, Marguerite longs only to study music at the Conservatoire de Paris; both plans are foiled when she falls in love with the son of a Cuban tobacco farmer. Late in the novel, of course, both halves of the story converge. The author’s construction is awkward—haphazard, even—while his dialogue frequently feels overshadowed by Hollywood scripts in a way that seems completely divorced from the way people actually speak. After the event that destroys his hand and most of his family, Naïm wakes up in the hospital. “ 'Where’s Dad?' ” he asks Fatima, his mother. “Fatima’s gaze seemed to harden. She started to speak, then shook her head, cleared her throat, looked away. Her implication was clear. ‘Anyone?’ he asked. She shook her head slightly.” The scene wouldn’t be out of place in an action movie, but that doesn’t seem to have been Toutonghi’s intent. Then, too, he has a habit of using current-day standards to evaluate things that would have preceded those standards—as, for example, when Marguerite considers that “her work had been validated.” It’s the early 20th century, and Marguerite is in Beirut: Would she really use validation language?

A novel that sags under the weight of improbable dialogue, two-dimensional characters, and various anachronisms.