In The Dead Leaves, a multiple voice narrates the journey of a man whose fundamental principle in life was to fight: as a young man for causes he rightly believed would benefit humanity; in old age and until the end, for causes he wrongly believed would benefit only him.
A member of a family of Lebanese immigrants, the protagonist goes from being a child newspaper vendor in a small town in the eastern United States, to a correspondent for a New York magazine in 1930s Moscow, to a combatant in the Lincoln Brigade in the Spanish Civil War. Later, among various jobs and tasks, he establishes and manages a hotel in Mexico City. Meanwhile, his deep-rooted passion for reading becomes his daily occupation, interrupted only occasionally by glances into the past, which he sees as a certainly happier time.
The spontaneity and fluidity with which Barbara Jacobs writes this novel tr...read more