“Already,” Jonathan Littell writes, “all this is turning into a story.” So ends Littell’s compilation of notebooks from his time in Homs, in western Syria, reporting for Le Monde on a “brief moment” (January 16 to February 2, 2012) in the ongoing uprising against the Assad regime. Almost immediately after his departure, he notes in an epilogue, many of the activists, opposition forces, and neighborhoods he documents here were “crushed in a bloodbath that, as I write these lines, is still going on.” The phrase “as I write these lines” first appeared in the French edition of the notebooks, published in 2012—yet in the years since, the bloodbath seems barely to have paused. At least in the US, the very duration of the conflict in Syria, currently in its fifth year, has somehow allowed it to slip from the front page, even as the humanitarian crisis worsens—as I write this, it is estimated that four million refugees have fled the country, and more than seven million are internally displaced.
The 2015 English-language edition of Littell’s notebooks—translated, as commendably as ever, by Charlotte Mandell—includes a new introduction discussing the subsequent rise of ISIS (or Da‘esh, as it is widely known in Arabic), a development the Assad regime cynically encouraged, in a brutal escalation of its effort to transform “a popular, broad-based, proletarian, and peasant uprising into a sectarian civil war.” The regime employed the familiar strategy of “playing the extremists against the moderates,” attempting to distract the West from the dictatorship’s own atrocities and position Bashar al-Assad as a necessary ally in our favored cause, the so-called war on terror.
Even in the fragmented form of the notebooks—which vividly capture these two weeks amid the uprising and burgeoning war—Littell anticipates how the complexity of this moment, and the fullness of the individual lives he encounters, will soon be reduced to mere “story.” Reduced even by him, an outsider who can come and go (though not without great risk, as the fate of other journalists in Syria attests). That story will then be read as “a vague and remote nightmare,” as he writes in his introduction, a nightmare that “seep[s] through our screens” but whose “bitterness we do our best to ignore.” He knows how the simplistic version of the Syrian conflict that is fed to Western readers serves oppressive ends: “The medieval barbarians on one side, the pitiless dictator on the other, the only two images we retain of a reality far more complex, opposing them when in fact they are but two sides of the same coin.” As he notes, although “as of September 2014, the regime had killed 124,752 Syrian civilians, including 17,139 children, as opposed to 831 civilians (of which 137 were children) killed by Da‘esh,” only the latter organization has fully commanded Western attention, and even that largely through the horrific spectacles—such as the 2014 murder of the journalist James Foley, filmed for dissemination—that Da‘esh engineered for precisely this purpose.
So what is it, exactly, that this gripping book, document of the recent and yet already distant past, offers? For Littell, the notebooks serve as a reminder that this nightmare began as “a dream of youth, liberty, and collective joy,” a secular revolution, and that, despite the claims of “our solemn leaders” in Europe and the US, “without our callous indifference, cowardice, and short-sightedness, things might have been different.” You could also say that Littell has humanized the conflict, introducing us to individual members of the Syrian opposition. We witness their dedicated civilian journalism, the “electric exhilaration” of the demonstrations, their joking and their testimony—as one man memorably says, he, like many others, deserted from Assad’s army “so as not to shoot at people, and I immediately took up arms.” We see funerals for the dead, and internal struggles for power, which often center on the control of information, and thus directly affect Littell and Mani, the photographer with whom he travels and works. Everyone they meet is under great threat from the regime; they protect identities carefully, practice “the art of taking decent pictures without a single face.” Littell also becomes our guide to the YouTube videos that have played an essential role in this war, serving at times almost as a virtual battleground—for years, any of us could have been watching them, and as Littell says darkly, “Those of you who don’t have too much trouble sleeping should take the time to watch some . . . I invite you to.” Over the course of the book we begin to get a sense of the courage with which thousands have continued to resist a regime that (as Littell witnesses) posts snipers on street corners to murder civilians; that transforms even hospitals into torture sites, employing doctors and confiscating ambulances to do so; that commits “sectarian massacres” such as that of “an entire Sunni family in the Nasihin neighborhood on the afternoon of January 26, 2012.” Littell was there when this happened, and believes it was the first such event—its sequels have only grown in scale.
Littell’s notebooks convey the complexity of the situation at that brief moment. He describes the different components of the regime’s forces; the “twofold social grid” that exists in the divided city of Homs, with one system run by the government, the other by the people; the diversity and conflict within the opposition; the range of opinions on how the international community could best help the Syrian population. Littell’s writing is precise, forceful, and free of ego. With a compelling brevity, he details the devastated apartments through which he and the opposition move, the meals they share, the dreams he is plagued with at night, the sounds and sights of the city: “paw prints in the concrete”; in one apartment, “fragments of a doll”; in another, “a long mirror pierced by an explosive round” and “a big punching bag . . . slowly swinging”. It is not easy to forget, as you read, that Littell is also a writer of fiction (two of his works are available in English, his acclaimed and much debated World War II novel from 2006, The Kindly Ones, and a 2013 collection of novellas, The Fata Morgana Books).
Yet, as for Littell’s hope that these notebooks should evoke the lost dream of the revolution, it strikes me that such a task is beyond even a book like this one. Often my experience of reading it seemed only to push me further from anything I might call knowledge. This is, in part, a question of form: Characters move so swiftly through Littell’s notes that they can blur into one another and become hard to track. And this may well be an effect Littell intended, or at least did not choose to avoid, in his endeavor to honor complexity. For the reader, it can mean that the labor of comprehension consumes our attention, overwhelming even our feelings of horror or compassion. Perhaps (as I suspect Littell might agree) this is a useful reminder that sentiment should always be accompanied by, if not subordinate to, the struggle to understand better.
Any reader of Syrian Notebooks perceives first and foremost the chaos and suffering that is Homs in 2012, a society that has been violently sundered. One incidental example: Two Sunni men in a traditionally mixed Sunni-Alawite area approach their Alawite neighbors to urge that “Whatever happens, whether the regime falls or stays, we’ll remain neighbors, we’ll continue to live together”; soon after, one of the Sunni men is arrested, and we learn that “the security forces [have] armed the Alawite civilians, and some had been seen shooting from their houses.” We cannot fully comprehend this devastation because we cannot see what came before it, cannot know all that has been lost. It is too easy for us just to borrow Littell’s word, “nightmare”—a word he earned through his reporting—throw it over that whole part of the map and turn away.
Littell’s other notable achievement, then, may be in how he anticipates the inevitable failures of his readers, how he draws our attention to the limits of war reportage, including his own. By publishing these notes as “a document, not a work of literature,” he provides us with his inchoate observations and experiences, preserving the moment before they turn into “a story.” A notebook can offer immediacy, mess, confusion; a story prefers clarity, contextualization, a path toward understanding. One consequence of this approach, as Littell notes in his epilogue, is that some of what he wrote in the notebooks now “makes me ashamed,” since later events have altered his perspective: “I thought that what I had seen was violent enough, and I thought I knew what violent means. But I was wrong.” Similarly, as you read this account that—intelligent and intelligible as it is—does not attempt the mastery or streamlined persuasion of narrative, you become more and more aware of how little you know. Many of the people Littell met in Syria are now dead, and some who survived have since joined the extremists; their fates diverge markedly from his own, and from those of his readers. Seeing people appear fleetingly in these pages, we begin to sense how much we cannot know of them; we realize that their stories may never be told.
Hilary Plum is the author of the novel They Dragged Them Through the Streets (FC2, 2013). She coedits the Open Prose Series at Rescue Press and is a book-review editor with the Kenyon Review.