The Crane

By Halim Barakat Translated by Bassam Frangieh and Ro

In The Crane, the renowned Syro-Lebanese author Halim Barakat creates a narrator who looks back wistfully on a childhood in a small village of Syria, then travels to the United States, and, with his wife, goes through the experiences of American college life in the 1960s. The narrative’s sequence invokes the world of the imagination in interpreting this nostalgic account of a Middle Eastern childhood and its international aftermath.