Cerf-Volant by Dominique Eddé: A critique of war or a reconstruction of memory?

SynopsisDominque Eddé's Cerf-volant is a novel about love with war as its backdrop. Contrary to the literary style of the Lebanese novel in vogue in the 1980s, Eddé does not linger on descriptions of violence and atrocities, preferring to devote herself to a lucid examination of the historical issues of a complex Middle East—an area of conflict. Through novelistic and fragmented language, the author strives to express in fiction the madness of war and a collapse of consciousness that calls into question an entire way of living and thinking. Distance, both spatial and chronological, allows the female protagonist to look at these events with a critical eye: the Arab–Israeli War of 1967, political unrest in Lebanon that became just after the war a privileged space for Palestinian resistance, and the civil war that began in 1975. Eddé's goal is to flush out memory with the intention of building a peaceful future.