"A Hand Full of Stars" by Rafik Schami - Done.

Written as a series of journal entries by a teenage boy living in 1980’s Damascus and who wants to be a journalist. I didn’t mean to read this book, but it compelled me fairly quickly based on just a thumb through.

The merits are the narrator’s relationships with older characters, especially his “uncle” Salim, the old coachman who on his deathbed gives the narrator a gold coin. The coin had been given to the uncle by a thief who told the uncle, “Give this to someone who has no other options.” The uncle discovers that he has never had to expend the coin, because there was always another option, but somehow the coin brought a certain peace.

The coin can then become a symbol or a metaphor for that last refuge that we hold dear. What is my last resort? Fortunately, my life has been sufficiently blessed with enough options that I haven’t had to contemplate this much.

The narrator also has a friend who is a washed up journalist named Habib, who is tired of censorship in Syria and choosing to spend his energies on translating. He inspires the narrator and his friend to start an underground newspaper. The most delightful conflict of the book is the problem of distribution of the paper without getting arrested. These gambits include folding copies into cheap socks that they then sell at the bazaar, packing copies into orange crates that will be exported to France, and (my favorite) sending up balloons holding light, flat little baskets of the leaflets to be blown out and about from on high by the wind.

These days, of course, they could just start a blog.