Rating: 4 stars
Headline: This darkly beautiful memoir yanks you in by the collar and refuses to let go
Review:
‘The past is a foreign country; they do things differently there’” were the words of L.P. Hartley, a quote strikingly applicable to the Middle East experiences of Ashe Stevens during 2006, while working in the Lebanese capital city of Beirut.
Jointly written with Magdalena, Ashe Stevens’ memoir Lost in Beirut starts as two business partners trying to orchestrate a concert for the rapper 50 Cent. A first time traveller to the region, Ashe is thrown headfirst into a strikingly different culture to his American roots. A place where economies halt five times a day for prayers and family reputation is everything. Ashe quickly discovers the latter for himself when he starts dating Aleyna, a woman who hails from a high-profile family in the Hezbollah district of Beirut.
Unknown to the city’s bustling residents, while the stage is being prepared for a career-defining concert, a bigger threat is brewing across the boarder in nearby Israel. In the days that follow, society is flipped from prosperity and glamour into a landscape where money means nothing and an American accent is enough to have you killed on sight. With the airport bombed and all roads out the country destroyed, Ashe must fight a new battle of his own and find an escape from within the rubble of Beirut.
Lost in Beirut is a highly likeable book, packed with beautiful imagery of a thriving city both before and after the months of bombing attacks. Written in first person present, it does take a few chapters to adapt to the tone of voice and tense (memoirs generally being written in past tense which makes for a more reflective style, whereas this feels more reactive). Once you get past this though the story yanks you in by the collar and refuses to let go, really coming into its own in the final third of the book where you get a sense of society falling apart. The world-building is more apocalyptic in this section, you can feel the raw panic of the mega rich on discovering their money is worthless, their expansive villas levelled flat in minutes. You would believe it to be a work of pure fiction, if it were not for the sadness that these events are true and actually happened. People died in this conflict.
A touching and, at points, quite graphic memoir, I come back to Hartley’s quote. With well over a decade having transpired between the 2006 Lebanese war and now, can we still claim the past to be a wholly foreign country? Or maybe we have to move on, embracing acceptance with the scars that are left.
AEB Reviews
Links:
Reedsy Discovery Review: AEB Reviews – “Lost in Beirut…” by Ashe and Magdalena Stevens
Purchase Link: “Lost in Beirut: A True Story of Love, Loss and War” by Ashe and Magdalena Stevens (Amazon)
Author Website: https://lostinbeirut.com/
**
**
My Housemate's a Mermaid 