The Vocabulary of Loss

The Vocabulary of LossSome losses cannot be named. They can only be inherited.The Vocabulary of Loss is a literary novel about memory, citizenship, trust, and the invisible mechanisms that allow societies to carry their wounds across generations without ever fully acknowledging them. Through a series of conversations and reflections, Professor Walid Destan explores what societies owe to each other, and what they owe to the generations that will follow.This is not a political novel. It is a human one. Set against the backdrop of a world in which institutions fail, hope briefly ignites and then dissolves, and ordinary people are left to make sense of what remains, The Vocabulary of Loss asks what it means to participate in a society rather than simply inhabit it.Bassem H. Boustany began writing this novel in French six years ago, not from anger at what he had witnessed, but from a deeper and more difficult feeling: disappointment. The disappointment of watching a society ask the right questions and still find no answers. That feeling, and the search for what lies beneath it, is what Professor Destan carries through every page.For readers of literary fiction who believe that what a society loses matters as much as what it builds, and that a novel can be the most honest form of political thought.

Pagina's: 396, Paperback, Bassem H. Boustany