Nasrallah goes to political extremes
Montreal’s Nasrallah takes an opposite view from 2011’s Niko, explores power in latest novel
How do you follow a hit?
All writers would like to have Dimitri Nasrallah’s problem. The Lebanon-born Montrealer’s second novel, 2011’s Niko, won multiple awards and an international readership with its story of an orphan’s long and perilous journey from the Middle East to Canada. It also drew the kind of emotional response that might have made a sequel very tempting. But as readers are about to find out, The Bleeds (Esplanade Books / Véhicule Press, 197 pages, $19.95) is a different beast.
“My impulse was to go as far away from Niko as I could while still being in the same thematic realm,” said Nasrallah, 40, in his Verdun home last week. “Having (written about) the youngest victim of these types of political scenarios, the other side of the coin would be the opposite extreme — the kind of autocrat that has been in power in the Middle East and elsewhere, often for multiple generations.”
It’s a strategy not much in vogue; if anything, we associate it more with Shakespeare than with contemporary fiction. On the plus side, it’s ripe for exploration, especially at a time where authoritarianism is on the comeback trail.
“We’ve become so preoccupied with the individual, with victimhood and its various incarnations, that it almost seems we’ve forgotten the ability to imagine ourselves into these larger looming power structures,” Nasrallah said. “I wanted to see if I could do that, and where it would lead.”
Where it has led in The Bleeds is to the fictional country of Mahbad, roughly located in or near the ex- Soviet Republics zone of Central Asia, an area that somehow remains an enigma to the world at large. While it might have been easier to set the novel in a real-world trouble spot, Nasrallah’s decision to invent one turns out to be astute: the reader is free to apply the story allegorically across a broad swath rather than look for specific models.
Mahbad is a small fiefdom useful to the big players on the global stage only because it possesses significant uranium deposits. What will happen when the last of the uranium has been mined and sold off scarcely bears thinking about: 50 years and three generations of mismanagement, corruption and despotism at the hands of the titular family dynasty have left the people desperate, and a large-scale revolt is all but inevitable.
Mustafa Bleed, son of modern Mahbad’s founder, is an oldschool strongman, ruthlessly suppressing the country’s restive ethnic majority by whatever means necessary. His son Vadim, who assumes putative control after his father suffers a stroke, is a version of the classic globehopping, diplomatically immune brat, with the crucial difference that he has never grown up: entering his 40s, the former race-car hobbyist will still fly off to a European fashion shoot when he really should be seeing to it that the country for which he is nominally responsible doesn’t implode. While he does evince a certain savvy, maybe even traces of idealism, what Vadim appears to lack is the inclination and discipline to put them into practice.
Fittingly, Nasrallah’s biggest coup comes out of his biggest risk: he represents both Mustafa and Vadim in the first-person, alternating their voices to increasingly dramatic effect and universalizing both his protagonists to the point where you can forget for pages at a time that this particular father and son happen to control a nation’s fate. Nasrallah even wrings some laughs from the paradox: at one point, in the timeless tone of paternal exasperation, Mustafa says: “Can I offer some advice to all the fathers out there? Never give a teenager a fully staffed private jet for his birthday.”
Where the book most invokes the Arab Spring cited on the back cover is in Nasrallah’s deployment of blog posts of the type that played a crucial role in the marshalling of popular resistance across North Africa and the Middle East in 2011. It’s not by chance that these posts, as well as occasional fictional newspaper accounts, are by women: they help balance out what might otherwise have been a testosterone overload.
The Bleeds has an incidentcount that could easily have filled a novel twice its length, but such is Nasrallah’s sure hand at the controls that you hardly notice until you’re done. As inspirations in this regard, he cites two writers from disparate genres, linked only by their disinclination to waste a sentence: James M. Cain and Philip K. Dick.
Finally, given one of Nasrallah’s themes — that the micro and macro are seldom as far apart as we assume — it feels fair to ask about a possible personal element. Granted that the circumstances are vastly different, has the author’s own experience as a first-time dad — as we chat on a weekday afternoon his eight-year-old son is at school down the street — informed his portrayal of Mustafa and Vadim?
“Definitely. It was my point of entry into writing about these characters with authenticity. What I have in common with them, after all, is the father-son relationship, and here I was, for the first time dealing with someone else who strangely enough has their own mind and is going to do what they’re going to do,” he said with a chuckle. “The amount of relinquishing of control you have to give, even though you’re not set up for that kind of relinquishing — it felt like fertile ground.”
In life as in fiction, then, it’s about knowing when to let go.