Casa Damasco by Maruan Soto Antaki

Review by Tania Valdés

The Short 

A Mexican woman remains in Syria because of her family roots amid civil war and government repression. In the chaos she meets and falls in love with an undercover regime informant.
The Long 

Syria, present time. A civil war breaks out in the country. Nobody wants to submit to a corrupt regime, full of ostentation and ineptitude, but neither does anyone seem to have the capacity to establish a new government that acts differently. The atmosphere becomes rarefied, repression reaches unlikely limits, such as bombing demonstrations. Cruelty takes over the streets and everyone seems to have accounts receivable. In the midst of this debacle, a woman born in Mexico but with strong family roots in Syria travels to the country and stays there for months, until she is forced to leave it, practically fleeing. That visit brings her closer to beloved and hateful family members, and to a culture that she believed to be forgotten, but it also leads her to fall in love with a man who for her is all tenderness, eroticism, kindness, even though her job is in principle that of being a paid hidden informant by the government, then a torturer, then an executioner. Is it possible to love a country like that, a man like that, covered in fraternal blood that does not stop spilling?

To read or not to read? 

Read! It is a story that depicts what refugee descendants go through and it’s interesting to understand the attachment to one’s roots. WARNING: It is in Spanish!