In both books, the life in a small town is carefully circled in episodic chapters. The story of the protagonist is only one among many… A little like a cubist painting peels off gradually from different perspectives, offering a complex picture, which goes far in its multidimensionality, beyond the horizon of individual actors.

In this lies the conflict that Douaihy recounts, that between Muslim and Christian realities, of which Nizam becomes a metaphorical symbol. At twenty, when he gets to Beirut, in the turmoil of the revolution, with the outbreak of the civil war, he must come to terms with his being Muslim and Christian. A dual membership to the two communities, seen not only with suspicion but decidedly rejected. The narrative power of Douaihy lies in his strong belief in the real possibility of telling emblematic stories, with strong characters who are never forgotten. Stories that become emblematic, like are the solitude and the identity of the torn protagonist.

The writer and literature professor Jabbour Douaihy is one of the foremost intellectuals of Lebanon. He wants to investigate the violence that shook this country again and again, by literary means. For decades, his family was involved in a blood feud that in the fifties, fell in one day twenty victims. The events of that time has Douaihy processed in his novel “June rain”. By mail, he gives me his phone number. I called.

Douaihy’s novel, Chased away, is out in Italian (Feltrinelli)!
The author was in Torino, Italy, for the launch of his book, and was invited to give the inaugural lecture at the prestigious Holden School of Writing and Storytelling, established by Alessandro Baricco in 1984.

“No one in the village wants to really give him any information. The survivors speak of generalities or give him conflicting versions of what happened. “People talk, just as they please,” says Kamleh, Elias’ mother, “you will not obtain anything for them, they will lie to you. Anyone who has lost a relative up there, tries to make a hero out of him… And who was himself up there and has flown the coop, does not know what to say, they rather remain silent.”"

Although June rain has a few lengths, it is an exciting, successful literary novel. In some ways it’s a coming of age novel from the Middle East, one that leaves no doubt about the central role of family militant organizations in the Lebanese civil war.

“Douaihy’s is a tragically fragmented approach to home with a fractured kaleidoscopic narrative that casts different sides of a spotlight on the central event… He succeeds in going under the skin of individual portraits.”