Sur la route de Palmyre

A travel narrator moves through towns and countryside, juxtaposing narrow, shadowed streets and colorful markets with irrigated gardens, desert steppes and cedar-topped mountains. Advances in transport, including an airplane flight, create a sudden aerial encounter with ruined colonnades and temples that prompts historical reflection. Descriptive passages are balanced by human sketches, most notably a plaintive portrait of a young woman partly educated in French who, after marrying into a village household, becomes the focus of jealousy and domestic violence culminating in the child’s murder and her suicide. The prose relies on restrained evocation and the mystery intrinsic to a traveler’s partial knowledge.