Title : From the Dead Princess - Kenizé Mourad - book
Summary :
Elle Roman Readers' Prize 1988
"This is the story of my mother, Princess Selma, born in a palace in Istanbul..." This could be the beginning of a tale; it is a true story, which begins in 1918 at the court of the last sultan of the Ottoman Empire. Selma was seven years old when she witnessed the collapse of the Empire that had shaken Europe. Condemned to exile, the imperial family settled in Lebanon. Selma, who had lost both her country and her father, would become "the princess with mended stockings." It was in Beirut that she grew up and met her first love, a young Druze chief; a love that was soon shattered. Selma then agreed to marry an Indian rajah she had never seen. In India, she would experience the splendor of the maharajahs, the last days of the British Empire, and the struggle for independence led by Gandhi. But there, as in Lebanon, she remains "the outsider." Rejected by the people she had come to love, she fled to Paris. There she finally found true love. War separated her, and she died in poverty at the age of twenty-nine, after giving birth to a daughter: the author of this story. For the first time, the end of the Ottoman Empire is told from inside the palaces, while we discover Lebanon under the French Mandate through the great families of Beirut, and feudal India through the eyes of its peasants and princes. It is rare for a book to combine the heart and history in such an intimate way. "Later, much later, writes Kenizé Mourad, I wanted to understand who my mother was. Questioning those who had known her, consulting history books, newspapers of the time and the scattered family archives, I tried to reconstruct the various frameworks of her existence, today irremediably disrupted, and to relive what she had experienced. Finally, to get even closer to her, to find her again, I trusted my intuition and my imagination. Such is this book. Such is the story of Princess Selma, the most romantic of true stories.
EAN : 9782221052181
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