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Laat Voor De Thee In Het Hertenpaleis. Een Familiegeschiedenis In Bagdad (2010)

by Tamara Chalabi(Favorite Author)

3.66 of 5 Votes: 4

languge

English

genre

Memoir & Autobiography

publisher

Artemis & co

review 1: It's important to differentiate between how well parts of Late for Tea at the Deer Palace are written and how much I disliked the people Tamara Chalabi writes about, namely, her family. Except for her grandfather, Hadi, they're all unsympathetic, which begs the question: is the author aware of that or is she as entitled and out of touch, as the three generations she portrays, starting with the main character and matriarch, Bibi. At one point, when war breaks out, the family temporarily relocates and must live without servants. Bibi becomes enraged to see her husband, Hadi, making baklava for the family.In much of the book, Chalabi does an excellent job of telling her family's story, while seamlessly weaving in clear explanations of Iraq's complex history, politics and ethn... moreic grievances (often stemming from the Sunni and Shia split) over religion, territory, oil, leadership, etc.Half way through, I began to wonder about the subtitle: The Lost Dreams of my Iraqi Family. For the Chalabi's, dreams primarily mean living in an intact peaceful Iraq. That peace, and one son's illness that led to blindness, seem to be the only things this family has not been able to control.The Chalabi's were Middle Eastern royalty. They built palaces at will. After one was erected and Bibi didn't like it, they simply built another one. Perhaps it's the custom in Iraq, but the Chalabi's don't use their vast fortune to make life better for the less well off. They keep it within the family. The one exception was an act of generosity by Hadi.In keeping with the theme of Chalabi's getting what they want, Ahmad, the author's father was obsessed with ridding his country of Saddam. Ahmad is also the Iraqi insider who's been accused of feeding the United States false intelligence on Saddam's weapons of mass destruction. Whether he's partly responsible for our rush to war and the subsequent deaths of hundreds of thousands of American and Iraqis, I don't know, but the Chalabi's always seem to get what they want. By Terry Baker Mulligan (Sugar Hill Where the Sun Rose Over Harlem)
review 2: One of the best books I have read indeed. Tamara; however, devotes more than half of the book so mesmerizingly telling the story of Iraq since the early 1900s until the fall of the monarchy and her family’s subsequent exile all beautifully depicted in and told through her family's biography- all of the history, politics, wars, the fall of the ottoman empire, the creation of Iraq and the subsequent events are beautifully and vividly sketched through the story of this family, that is through the human beings who lived and experienced those events; most important of all the reader can clearly see how modernity affected the society, its people, norms, ethos, way of life. The writing style, lyrics, prose and words are no less impressive. Tamara then takes the reader to her family’s exile in London then Beirut where the civil war there forced them to go back to London- her father moves to Jordan then London then eventually back to Iraq. Events that followed the fall of the monarchy in Iraq are very well documented but not so vividly sketched as the ones before the fall of the monarchy. Also, I wish she had written more on the events that followed the fall of Sadam which is not the case- for that I recommend the following book for whoever is interested in the History of Iraq: Imperial Life in the Emerald City: Inside Iraq's Green Zone Rajiv Chandrasekaran. Nevertheless, she tells a story that must be read to understand current Iraq. less

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