The Daily Cartoon and Live Briefing: Sunday, March 26, 2023

Byblos: Amin Maalouf is a Lebanese author who writes in French. He won France’s leading Prix Goncourt for a 1993 novel, was elected to the French Academy in 2012, and keeps being short-listed for the Nobel Prize, but a bit far down the list. He writes novels and non-fiction, most notably in the non-fiction category a trilogy that can be summed up by his last, in 2020: Adrift: How Our World Has Lost Its Way. His works have been translated in about 40 languages. Most of them have their American translation, but not his last novel, published in late 2020, called Nos frères inattendus, which can be translated either as Our Unexpected Brothers or our Uninvited Brethren. No doubt the translation is on its way. It’s not a strong novel, certainly not as strong as his many previous ones. I’d characterize it more as a tale, borrowing elements from Jules Verne at that, otherwise he couldn’t have pulled off the premise, which does make for an interesting thought experiment: the world is about to blow itself up with a nuclear exchange. But these mysterious men (there are no women in their cast) suddenly appear–human beings like you and me, but so far evolved that their intelligence and technology is capable of immobilizing all other human agencies at the snap of a finger. They can also cure cancer, rehabilitate the sick, even bring back the recently dead. And they all bear Greek names, as if they are descendants of Greece’s 5th century, but without the intervening religious and ideological retardants on the ability of progress and intellect to flourish freely. Maalouf, a humanist, is taking up in his tale a way out of the prisonhouse he explored in Adrift and his two previous non-fiction works (Disordered World: Setting a New Course for the Twenty-First Century came in 2011): what if the world could be saved by an unexpected, all-powerful “intervention” (a word that recurs in the novel) that is neither extra-terrestrial nor supernatural, but made of human flesh and blood, a sort of better angels of our nature that held out in abeyance in mysterious parts of the planet until the imminence of an obliterated planet made the intervention necessary. It’s an attractive idea, straight out of Maalouf’s civil war sensibility as a Lebanese: under the bombs, we all wished and prayed for one such intervention, if not one so far-fetched. We thought the French, the Americans, even the Israelis could save us if only… As it turned out, all three did intervene in the Lebanese civil war, all three left after catastrophic results, leaving behind a country more ruined than before they intervened. So it is in this tale: the strangers cause more upheavals than they resolve. They retreat whence they came (the novel lacks too much versimilitude to make it worth debating on those terms), seemingly leaving humanity on its own again. I have a few pages to go, so maybe there’s an even stranger twist at the end. I hope not. (There wasn’t. I add these lines after finishing the book, with an ending sentimental and cheesy). The thought experiment is enough as it is: what would we do with ourselves if an overpoweringly intelligent force were to overwhelm us? One of the answers is from an excerpt from the book, in the quote below: the Aztecs and Incas sure found out. Freeman Dyson used to warn against wishing for any encounters with extra-terrestrial life, or at least intelligent extra-terrestrial life: it would wipe us out as surely as Europe did the Incas. So Our unexpected brothers ends up being an appeal to Camus’ existentialism: live it up on your terms, courageously, humanely, and without the distorting, self-deluding presumptions of forces beyond yourself, beyond your world. Find it in yourself to save yourself, yourselves. There are no saviors in any form but ourselves, if we manage not to self-destruct first. We’ve made it this far, those of us in the fortunate dominant cultures, but for how long? And anyway—a question also raised by Maalouf’s only female character—how deserving are we to be saved, whether by ourselves or anyone else? That the answer can only be ambiguous is indictment enough.

—P.T.

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What the Aztecs or Incas learned is now happening under our eyes to the entirety of human societies: a brutal de-valorization of knowledge, of our vision of the world, of our identity, of our dignity.

–From Amin Maalouf’s Our Unexpected Brethren, or Nos frères inattendus (2020).

 

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