Late for Tea at the Deer Palace
Release date: 2012 / 448 pages
Synopsis(from Amazon): Just ten days after Baghdad’s fall in 2003, Tamara Chalabi arrived in the city after a lifetime in exile—finally entering the homeland she’d known only through stories and her own imagination. Investigating four generations of her family’s history at the forefront of Iraqi society, Chalabi offers a rich portrait of Middle Eastern life and a provocative look at a lost Iraq. Unforgettable characters provide glimpses of the end of the Ottoman Empire, the birth of the Iraqi state, the flowering of “the Paris of the Middle East,” and Iraq’s descent into chaos. At once intimate and magisterial, Chalabi’s memoir of return and reclamation vividly captures the rich history of a country shattered by war and a family that has never forgotten its past.
Review: Already this year I’ve recommended a number of great reads that would also be excellent book club choices, but Late for Tea at the Deer Palace unequivocally tops this list. Not only is Chalabi’s memoir a fabulous read — nearly impossible to put down — but it is the most important, most significant book I’ve read this year and one that is challenging to review since I will be unable to do it justice.
Chalabi’s prose is effortless — one of those books I forget I was actually reading, so immersed in the characters, storyline, and setting I became. However, “storyline” really discounts the importance of what Chalabi has accomplished. I wish every American would read Chalabi’s family history in order to get a sense of Iraq — as a homeland, a viable country, a nation filled with people who share the same universal longings and experiences — to help temper the post-Saddam Hussain Iraq that has clouded this generation’s understanding of this beleagured country.
However, Deer Palace is not a political book in the sense of “red state / blue state.” Chalabi first visited Iraq in 2003, ten days after the fall of Baghdad to US-led coalition forces. In the prologue she states
Everybody asks me about my father. He has been labelled a maverick, a charlatan, a genius. He has been named as the source of supposedly faulty intelligence that led America into the war in Iraq… But this is my story… One of Iraq’s burdens has always been the way it is presented to the outside world as patchy, Manichaean, extreme. It is a nation that is portrayed either through its politics, most notoriously through Saddam and his regime, or through its ancient and glorious history, but never through its people… My family’s stories of Iraq are more personal and intimate than a disspassionate and neatly constructed history. they show the country throught the lives of people who have loved it.
Chalabi starts her family’s history with her great-grandfather in 1913 — during a pastoral time of prosperity and service — and continues to the present. Chalabi herself was born in 1973 “in exile” in Lebanon to an Iraqi father and Lebanese mother, raised in Jordan, educated in England and the U.S. She focuses primarily on her grandmother Bibi and grandfather Hadi; Chalabi’s ability to bring to life her ancestors allows the “history of Iraq” to be seen through humanistic eyes — a rich understanding of this country so misunderstood by the West is a gift to everyone who reads it.
My primary emotion upon finishing Deer Palace was gratitude — that I was allowed to get to know Iraq as well as allowed to share this work with my own readers, but I’m afraid I cannot give away my copy this time — it is slated to become a gift very soon… if I can part with it 
Tuesday, January 31st: BookNAround
Monday, February 6th: Books Like Breathing
Tuesday, February 7th: The Whimsical Cottage
Thursday, February 16th: Broken Teepee
Friday, February 17th: Boarding in My Forties
Monday, February 20th: Library of Clean Reads
Tuesday, February 21st: A Bookish Affair
Wednesday, February 22nd: Man of La Book
Thursday, February 23rd: Ted Lehmann’s Bluegrass, Books, and Brainstorm
Friday, February 24th: Book Club Classics!
Monday, February 27th: Bookstack
Tuesday, February 28th: Luxury Reading
Pingback: Tamara Chalabi, author of Late for Tea at the Deer Palace, on tour February 2012 | TLC Book Tours
WOW, top of the list of books for this year?! That’s definitely saying a great deal about the quality of this book.
Thanks for being on the tour.
Sounds like a great book. Enjoyed the review. Thank you for recommending this book. Would love to read it.
Having read Azar Nafisi’s book for our book club, this one would be a good comparison.
Please enter me in your giveaway.
Thanks.
I’m so sorry!! I’m going to give this one as a gift, so no giveaway… Sorry about my misleading title!!