Charif Majdalani, a disenchanted prince

Childhood invents the kingdoms that adulthood watches Pierre after Pierre …

In his new novel The name of the kings, Without doubt the most personal of his work, Charif Majdalani returns to his childhood in the careful Lebanon of the pre-war period. The reader accompanies a narrator, passionate about books and history, which evolves in a world of epic readings and royal genealogies: “Like others collect butterflies or stamps, I collected the names of kings”, he confides.

When he sometimes meets a child king at school and a Bedouin chief in Iraq, the figures of grandeur who nourish his imagination are cracking. This is how his disillusionment begins. Then comes the big tilting: that of the civil war which ravaged Lebanon in 1975. “My childhood and my adolescence were ending there (…), with the end of the country which had served as their decor. The author also arrives in the most raw reality. The story he had so much read and admired, is now done before his eyes, without the literary prism which once allowed him to tame him: “She did not have the great lyricism that literature or the too smooth stories of the historians I loved. I discovered it now and I found it ugly, routine and vulgar. »»

In his disfigured city, he confronts acts of violence: militiamen who swing their opponents of a highway bridge and who “have fun killing them while they fell”, a man dragged to the back of a militiaman’s jeep, dams and captivities … He then tries, as usual, to take refuge in literature, but alas, it is also transfigated, In the eyes of this adolescent who discovers that the heroes of his favorite stories often have dirty hands: “Achilles by dragging behind his chariot the corpse of Hector in the Iliad had acted as local militiamen and as all militiamen in the world. I no longer wanted the heroes. I didn’t want any epics anymore. History inspired me more and more a sacrosanct horror. »»

Disillusions therefore, but also friendly links, first loves, confrontation with violence, and self -construction … because The name of the kings can be read as a learning novel. Majdalani retraces there, through his refined pen, this moment of transition to adulthood when the enchantment of childhood gives in front of the brutality of reality, especially in a country such as Lebanon of the 1970s, which rushes into an interminable conflict which transforms its face.

Interview with a writer who describes himself in The name of the kings Like a “despotic little prince”, but whose name seems to be promised to the royal lines: his students and friends already call him “the King Maj”!

This novel may be your most personal book and is very close to an autobiographical story. What is the share of fiction in the names of the kings?

The story is a faithful portrait of what I was at the end of adolescence. Everything is real, but wrapped in a thin layer of fiction. This very small part of fiction, by which I replaced the son of a high dignitary by a king’s son and a trip that I did not make with my father in Iraq by a trip that I tell as real, is also embodied in the changes of first names and the modification of toponyms. This gave me greater latitude in the story of the facts and gave greater elasticity to the text. But in the end, all this remains minimal and The name of the kings is indeed undoubtedly my most intimate book.

Is it difficult to get bare?

I wrote the first part of the names of the kings over fifteen years ago. I made it out of pure desire, by a kind of pulse of the moment. But I did not plan to publish it. Besides, in the meantime there have been six or seven other books, and this one remained in the drawer, literally, and on the computer. Not that I had doubts about its quality, on the contrary, I often reread it with delight, but I could not resolve it to offer it to my publishers. By modesty, for fear that the most secret of me goes unnoticed, and also no doubt, more deeply, because of the feeling that this book, still reduced to its only first part, remained as unfinished, and that it was necessary. It was only when I finally wrote the second part that I decided to offer the text to Manuel Carcassonne, director of Stock editions. But even at that moment, an incomprehensible inhibition had prevented me from going to the end of certain things, simple things, such as the final scene or that of the sight of the people removed from a dam. I believe that I repugnted to the high heart to tell the materiality of the war, the horrors seen up to adolescents, that is to say objects of guilt, rehashing, of suffering killed. It was Manuel Carcassonne who felt the lack and my resistance. By dint of insistence, he ended up getting me out of my entrenchments and convincing me to write these pieces.

The village of Massiaf where the narrator takes refuge with his family is a kind of refuge and revealer. Like him, many Lebanese have known this experience of being far from war without being foreign to the ambient tragedy. What role does this village play in your novel?

This village, whose name I changed (it is Ghiné, in Kesrouane) was the decor of all my childhood, before the war. So I had established with him a sort of secret friendship pact, and invested in him a lot of my reveries, because of the Roman ruins which are still there, of the so-called Bas-relief of Adonis, but also and above all because of the distance, which at that time was palpable, and of the savagery of the places which guaranteed me during the summer a break with the city daily, and also with the world. When the war started, especially during the fall and summer 1976, these places were invaded by countless families fleeing the fights, and who transported a joyful and festive life, despite the war everywhere else. I then had the feeling that I was flying my property, which became the good of all. And above all, it was during this period, and in this decor of my passions of childhood and first adolescence that I experienced the horrors of the day day by day, by the stories of people, by newspapers, by what I also saw sometimes. It is therefore in this place also that my return to reality has taken place.

This book is also a learning novel, a kind of sentimental education with the start of the war as a backdrop. There is a striking contrast between the carelessness of the pre-war and the horror of the war. Have you experienced this tilting?

Of course. It is also one of the words of the book. I am part of the latest generation, I believe, to keep some memories of the pre-war Lebanon. I was fifteen years old when the Lebanese conflict was launched. I was sufficiently aware to see how our daily life had transformed suddenly, how the life of my parents had changed quality, how the places they frequented had suddenly disappeared. And all this, I felt it even more violently at my level, with the break that the first two years of war have constituted, where we were no longer going to school, or so intermittently, where our classmates were no longer the same, where the geography of our childhood was suddenly evaporated. In other words, the end of my adolescence coincided with the end of ancient Lebanon. And it is this double loss that I try to tell.

Your narrator is also a maniac of the names of kings and royal genealogies. Do you share this passion with him?

I liked the royal genealogies, not those of the kings of contemporary mondanities but the ancient, disappeared royalty, those of distant and unknown peoples. And this passion, which accompanied another, that of the great epic stories, of the history of Napoleon or Alexander the Great, I understood much later that she was a passion for words, for their beauty, their ability to create emotion. The genealogies I reconstituted were like kinds of poems. Literary sensitivity was already there, under a strange disguise.

How did the narrator’s friendships help to forge his character?

In the book, the narrator has a lot of friends and friends with whom he spends time, plays board games or comics. It was a bit of our daily life at that time. But the bizarre reveries of the narrator are little shared by the others. When the one who will become his best friend appear, a kind of royal heir, it is these reveries that he thinks of seeing to materialize in reality. Except that his friend does not see himself as a king, but as a boy of his time.

Are the female “conquests” of the narrator illustration of the trial and error of a teenager who is looking for himself or a kind of outlet for him?

There are not really love conquests. The adolescent that I was passed without seeing or noticing them alongside many possible and failed adventures, because he was too busy by his epic passions. I wanted the things of life to coincide with these passions too imbued with readings, and I loved girls in a too lyrical way, in accordance with too sophisticated fantasies. So much so that I never crossed with them the step towards something concrete. Chance (or not) wanted my first concrete romantic experience to take place when, in contact with the brutality of the war, ended my bookcases, where my disillusions with regard to epic stories became strong and where I finally got in touch with real life and its horrors. While bringing me back to reality too, my first love adventure also saved me from what this reality had horrible.

The names of the Kings of Charif Majdalani, Stock, 2025, 216 p.