Description

By Edmond Y Nicolas
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The Tomato War and Theomachy is a tale of romance and history. Author Edmond r
Nicolas paints a portrait of life in Rasha, his small village that is located r
in the mountains of rural Lebanon. From there, he chronicles the yesteryears, r
tying together the repetitive effects of history and warfare in the Middle East. r
Nicolas moves through to 1975, when suddenly Lebanon was at war, and the Christian r
peoples were forced to defend their lives at the outskirts of their villages. r
They suffered and fought alone for their freedom against the same terror that r
the world witnessed on 9/11.

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Edmond Y. Nicolas was born in Rasha, a small village in Mount Lebanon. In 1975, r
Nicolas was to enroll in law school when a savage war broke out in his homeland. r
He graduated from the faculty of law in 1984, while the vicious war for survival r
was still burning in his dreams and the dreams of his generation. In 1987, Nicolas r
moved to America while the war continued in Lebanon. His aspirations to write r
about the war originated on the first day he settled in Austin, Texas. This r
was when he learned how much the American people were sensitive to Hollywood r
dramas, yet remained ignorant of the real dramas that persist beyond their opened r
borders. In 2003, Edmond Nicolas married Vida Kabkab in Nicosia, Cyprus. They r
live with A.J, their first-born son Andrew-Joseph, in Austin, Texas. r

Book Review (By Joseph Hitti)
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Edmond Nicolas is yet another Lebanese immigrant whose achievement in writing r
this novel will be in the tradition of many Lebanese writers who, having journeyed r
from their small country by the Mediterranean in times of war and turmoil to r
lands afar, feel the need to share with their fellow human beings the complex r
interaction between their their multi-dimensional Lebanese identity on one hand r
and their adopted cultures on the other. I witnessed the growth and evolution r
of this story from its inception as an idea n the mind of Edmond Nicolas, through r
the long and painstaking task of putting it into words, and now to the day it r
is published. With a substance that is vaguely reminiscent of the Latin American r
magical realism genre of Gabriel Garcia-Marquez and others, Mr. Nicolas’ r
story takes you on a voyage from the cruelty and ugliness of the Lebanese War r
that ultimately drove him to these shores, through his own reminiscences of r
an idyllic pastoral childhood in Mediterranean Rasha in the hills of North Lebanon r
(not unlike the childhoods of many of us of his generation growing up in pre-war r
Lebanon), and on to the fictional deliriums couched in the time of the Phoenicians, r
those ancient Lebanese who invented the very same phonetic alphabet used by r
writers all over the world today. Time seems immaterial as the web of these r
elements is woven into the story, but with the trigger for the novel being the r
shock of the September 11 attacks, we are always somehow reminded by the writer r
that history, reality, fantasy and fiction can act in concert to define how r
we view the world and how our spirits comprehend it. And as the prototypical r
American immigrant, Mr. Nicolas does not shy away from expressing his sensitivities r
to the inadvertent lack of knowledge by his American counterparts of the world r
beyond our sea-toshining-sea America. But to me, the most wonderful of all the r
little stories in this book is “Wedding and Election”, where Mediterranean r
village shrewdness, sense of humor, and joie-de-vivre are reflected in the tradition r
of those other Mediterranean story-tellers Alphonse Daudet or Marcel Pagnol. r
For in the end, like Mr. Nicolas, after long years of exile and separation, r
we all dream of returning to the village, to the stone houses our fathers’ r
hands built on the hills, because we all know deep down that the “America” r
we found in our adopted lands has always been there, in the places we came from r
and which we left behind in our flight from the madness of war. Because, unfortunately, r
in many places on earth, this eternal and constitutive “America” is r
often assassinated in the hearts of men by forces not unlike those that brought r
the two towers down in New York.

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Language: English
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ISBN: 0595336388
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2004, Paperback, 318 pages, 6 x 9"