Elias KhouryRecensioni

The writing is beautiful and I really like the themes, but I just don't have it in me to read 530 pages of what is almost stream of consciousness.

During the aftermath of the 1948 Arab-Israel War, the residents of the city of Lydda (now Lod) were forced to leave their homes. Later, those homes would house Jewish refugees, themselves displaced from their homes in Bulgaria. But a few Arabs, Muslim and Christian, stayed behind in Lydda and were gathered together into what the soldiers guarding them called a ghetto. Children of the Ghetto: My Name is Adam by Lebanese author Elias Khoury and translated by Humphrey Davies, tells the story of one boy, the first child born into this new version of Lydda.

The novel begins with a long introduction from a university professor in New York named Elias Khoury, who met Adam briefly and disliked him intensely, mostly because they shared a romantic interest in the same woman but also out of consternation. Adam Dannoun is the cook in a falafel restaurant, well-educated and well-spoken, but he speaks both Arabic and Hebrew like a native. When Adam dies, the woman brings a stack of notebooks to Elias. She had been instructed by Adam's will to destroy them, but finds herself unable to do so. Elias, upon reading the notebooks, initially wants to write a novel based on the contents, but decides instead to submit them as they are for publication.

What follows begins as what one might find in the private notebooks of a scholar, a series of abortive attempts at writing the story of a Yemeni poet during the time of the Caliphates, followed by a rambling entry about his life in general, but all of this is necessary to the meat of the novel, Khoury taking his time to set up ideas and the life of this first witness before leading into what life was like for the people who stayed behind in Lydda, after most of the people had fled.

This was a powerful and understated novel about a part of the world whose history I know too little about. Khoury's slow and meandering style was wonderful and I'll be reading more by this author.

I cannot believe I am still reading this book! (Nearly a month later).
It churns and churns, repeating itself endlessly, maybe adding a little more detail with each telling.
And the torture, I hate reading about torture; maybe I have my head in the sand but it distresses me that people can be so cruel to each other.
Mind you, the main character isn't much better, he may be a product of the Lebanese Civil War, but he's a nasty piece of work too - a rapist who doesn't even realise that what he's doing is rape.

What I'm finding truly fascinating is that, by chance, I have two different translations and I keep swapping between the two. Humphrey Davis's version is very much more poetic, it has more of an Arabic feel to it, while Peter Theroux seems to write for a more Western audience, less flowery but sometimes too direct. I'd struggle to say which version I prefer and I'm definitely spending too much time comparing them.

Just under 100 pages to go and I guess I'm going to struggle through to the end now. The book group has been and gone, so I'm just doing this for myself(?!). I need to know how Yalo will end up, though I can't say I really care if he meets a grisly end.......

16th December and I finally finished. It didn't get any better, although someone from the book group promised me it would. If Elias Khoury's intention was to highlight the fate of the lost children of a generation, then I'm sure he would have benefited from taking the chance to spend more time with his characters actually on the streets. It seems to me that this endless repetition of Yalo's story just wastes the opportunity of having someone concentrate on your book.
I'm assured that Khoury's book 'Gate of the Sun' is a wonderful read, but I think it'll be a while before I come back for more of this.
2 starts just because I finished.

Lyrical, haunting and unforgettable.

Elias Khoury is a very interesting writer to me. As fas as I'm concerned his Gate of the Sun is a masterpiece. As though she were sleeping falls a bit short of that. Kind of Middle Eastern magical realism. Not really that big of a fan of magical realism so this was a bit of a hard one for me.

This is a beautifully written novel, in which Khoury draws inspiration from stories he heard from Palestinians in refugee camps. The stories are told from the perspective of Khalil, who is a close friend, almost a son, to Yunes, a Palestinian freedom fighter who is in a coma, a result of a massive stroke. Although others have given Yunes up for dead, Khalil sits vigil by his hospital bedside and recounts stories, in an effort to make sense of their lives, and to make some contact with Yunes.

The novel is written as stream of consciousness, with Khalil often telling different versions of the same stories. He goes back and forth over time, and grapples with the instability of memory and questions of motivation and identity. Although the novel's style requires patience from the reader, I thought it beautifully represented the instability of truth and reality in a refugee camp. He also shows again and again the fervent desire to return home, and the impossibility of that.

Also of interest to me were Khoury's representations of women. He depicts them as strong, and provides vivid examples of the weight they have borne under exile.

Recommended for anyone interested in the Palestinian experience in exile, and for readers who are interested in the instability of memory, and in the role of stories in creating identities.

قرأت الياس خوري من قبل في رحلة غاندي الصغير . . واعجبت بأسلوبه . اعتقد أنّ من يكتب بالتزامن مع الاحداث يجيد اقتناص الحكاية وهي دافئة
وهذا ما حصل مع خوري في رواية الوجوه البيضاء . . تتراءى لنا بيروت وكأنها مدينة اشباح بل اكثر رعباً . . رائحة الموت تقتل رائحة الأمل . .
الحوارات التي كان يطعمها باللبنانية العامية جعلت الأجواء اكثر حقيقية . . الدراسة الدقيقة ونقل الصور التاريخية الينا
الحكاية لم تكن حكاية مقتل شخص أو اشخاص ، هي مقتل كل شيء وبدء الحياة من جديد . .

يقول في عرض الرواية :
انك تعودت على بيروت خلال الحرب ، والذي تعود على بيروت لا يستطيع ان يعيش في أية مدينة اخرى. لانه لا يستطيع ان يتخيل المدن دون حرب ، لانه يعرف ان كل هذه العلاقات والاحترامات سوف تنهار مع اول قذيفة . .

شيء ما في هذه الرواية اخذني لأجواء بلاد الاشياء الاخيرة لبول اوستر . .
احببتها واحببت الجانب الحقيقي فيها ،
لدي المزيد من الكتب لالياس خوري واظن انني لن اتردد في قراءتها لاحقاً .

This was a really hard one to push through. The story was cool and a lot of it was really good, but the writing was like reading a list of sentences; they didn't flow well and sometimes didn't even make sense next to each other. Part of that may be because it is a translation, I don't know, but it was an okay book that could have been very good, if the writing wasn't so clunky.½

If good literature mirrors and explores the human condition in itself, and its individual but endlessly repetitive patterns of interaction with others at the levels of the individual, the commune and the nation, in the present and the past....which I believe it does....then this is a great novel.

This is a novel about the history of the Palestinian people, from their initial expulsion from Galilee in 1948, through myriad wars, civil wars, incursions, massacres....all told through stories of individuals, a web woven by a man recounting them to an old friend, Yunes, an old Palestinian fighter who is in a coma. The structure of the novel mirrors the lives of the Palestinians: it rambles and swerves in unexpected directions because there is no stable timeline for the Palestinians, no over-arching narrative of place, no coherent national story, only overlapping and often contradictory myths. Nothing in the novel is as it seems: the hospital is not really a hospital, the doctor is not really the doctor, the nurse is not really a nurse…..political organizations rise and fall and re-shape themselves and work and fight in a bewildering world of constantly shifting alliances….there seems to be no constancy in life other than emigrating to Europe or North America or finding some stability by marrying outside the tribe and making a life in a city.

And how does one try to capture these “confusions of life” when, “anything you say comes apart when you write it down and it turns into symbols and signs, cold and bereft of life. Writing is confusion; tell me, who can write the confusions of life? It’s a state between life and death that no one dares enter.”

Khoury captures the confusions of life with an approach that is not so much stream-of-consciousness as stream-of-memory through the stories and ruminations that Kahlil recounts, not only to remember events and people, but to try to know the truth of the past, as much as that is possible in a world of human, political, social interactions and forgotten or hidden motivations. Memory is a major theme of the novel: the construction, meaning and influence of memory when it is innocently fallible at the best of times, can be manipulated at its worst and what then, in either case, is the truth or is there such a thing? Memory is, “…the process of organizing what to forget….We talk about things and forget other things. We remember in order to forget, this is the essence of the game.” But memory is also collective: “…is memory a sickness—a strange sickness that afflicts a whole people? A sickness that has made you imagine things and build your entire lives on the illusions of memory?” And memory becomes history but again, this is unstable ground and Kahlil says, “I’m scared of a history that has only one version. History has dozens of versions, and for it to ossify into one leads only to death.”

Gate of the Sun is also about love of family and place, the strength of family and tradition and generations, as anchors in a world of turmoil and violence and uncertainty. It is about family and love of parents and children and grandchildren and the emotional, personal and sexual love of a partner. It is that underlying all the destruction and revolution and war, there are very basic, human desires in play as when Nahailah, wife of Yunes, tells him that she can no longer live their disconnected, dangerous life and that she wants, “…to assure my children’s future. I want them to build houses, and find work, and marry, and live. I want the illusions to end….”.

The novel is also about myth-making and the loop of myth-makers making their own myths and believing them and what that means for history and its interpretation…but who makes up the myths, which ones have the most lasting appeal, what do they say about a people? Every nation, every people has myths, but not all circumstances are the same. As Kahlil asks in musing to Yunes, “Do you believe we can construct our country out of these ambiguous stories? And why do we have to construct it? People inherit their countries as they inherit their languages. Why do we, of all the peoples of the world, have to invent our country every day so everything isn’t lost and we find we’ve fallen into eternal sleep?”

Reviewers have noted the echo of 1001 Nights where Scheschardze tells the sultan stories every night to stave-off death....so the narrator remembers, recounts, interprets stories of his life, of the life of his friend, and of others who come to mind through storytelling...he wants to believe that his friend can hear through his coma and that recounting the stories can restore him to life, even as his body regresses to the state of an infant....Scheschardze did gain a pardon and lived. Yunes does not, but through his storytelling and remembering, Kahlil gains new perspectives on life and memory.

There is also an echo of an odyssey in the sense of a constant seeking for home by the hundreds of thousands of displaced people. However, the effort is futile because the home no longer exists....it has been occupied by the Israelis, or bulldozed out of existence, or lies destroyed in areas no longer accessible....though many continue to believe and hope, because they must, that they can, and will return. Home, even if it no longer exists, becomes a holy grail of constant search and thus one can never be truly happy wherever one is. But time...and generations...smooth out those memories as children and grandchildren move on with their lives, marry outside their circles, and the "homes" of odysseyian fervour become tales of family life and villages valuable only to the old, except where myth-making has taken over.

Khoury describes atrocities by the Israelis but he does so without judgement...he lets the actions speak for themselves. He does say at one point that the systematic murder of Jews in WWII blighted the humanity of all persons, but then as one protagonist says to an Israeli interrogator: you do not have the right to terrorize us because you were terrorized. While another notes that it is not right that they, as Arabs displaced by Jews should, in turn occupy the homes of Christians who have themselves been displaced....otherwise, where does the cycle stop?

The most disturbing scenes are those of Israeli officers singling out men from groups rounded up in village squares...men who are trucked away and never seen again or shot and their bodies left in a field or against a wall. I have no idea of frequency, I hope that most Israeli soldiers were more compassionate, but I don’t doubt that this occurred and it differs morally not one iota from an SS officer rounding up Jews to be murdered. This is, for either the SS or the Israeli officer, the pernicious effect of considering the “other” as a different, lower order of humanity. Khoury extends and explores this concept of the “other” whether that be someone of a different village or religion or nationality and how the concept underpins and "justifies" tragedy and death whereas seeing oneself in the other just might be a basis for compassion.

I think that this is the hope that Khoury sees through the fog of death and prejudice and destruction, a possibility of common understanding among peoples in the recognition that we are all both monsters and saints, that we carry the possibility of both in the same body politic and in the same individual. As he says, “I’m not equating executioner and victim. But I do see a mirror broken into two halves, which can only be mended by joining the two parts together. Dear God, this is the tragedy: to see two halves that come together only in war and ruination.”

A last thought, a connection that I made in reading this novel. At one point Kahlil muses about the “…wisdom of photos that fill our lives. The victims of massacres have no names and no shrouds. Their bodies are covered with lime and insecticides before being thrown into a common grave. People disappear because they have no names, they are reduced to numbers. That’s the terrifying thing, my son, numbers are the terror. That’s why people carry pictures of their dead and their missing, and use them as a substitute for names.”.

This recalled, for me, a room in the Holocaust Museum in Washington, not a large room but one with a high ceiling of maybe 12-15 feet, maybe more, and every square inch of every wall is covered with photographs of people in every day poses: a wedding celebration, a family gathering, at a beach, at work, outside a house, in a field, on a picnic, by a river, mothers, fathers, siblings, grandparents, work colleagues….and every single nameless photograph is of a Jewish person, a Jewish family from one small village, in Poland I think, that was totally eradicated and every person in the photographs, every man, woman and child murdered. But, as Khoury says, the photographs gave back some of their humanity, rescued them from the forest of oblivion that is the incomprehensible numbers.

This is a very fine novel. Interesting for its history of the Palestinian causes and people and even more so for its insights into the commonalities of the human experience. A book that deserves to be read, and re-read. (March, 2011)

White Masks is a murder mystery told from the perspective of six different characters, and each account raises the possibility of one or more possible perpetrators. Statements by the narrator, a self-described disinterested party who is merely curious about this unusual murder, bookend the six versions. But this genre plot is merely a device for social commentary on the Lebanese Civil War and its effects on the ordinary people of Beirut.

Khalil Ahmad Jaber is a simple man, a minor civil servant in the post office, who derives a great deal of self-respect from the fame and then martyrdom of his son, Ahmed. Obsessed with his son’s death, Khalil gradually becomes benignly insane, wandering his neighborhood whitewashing the poster covered walls of the city. His death seems inexplicable. Who would want to torture and then murder this obsessed but harmless old man?

The narrator, a travel agent originally trained to be a journalist, becomes interested in the case and interviews the victim’s wife, a gossiping architect well-known in the neighborhood, the wife of the deceased caretaker of a local building, the garbage man who discovered the body, a young militiaman who witnessed the victim being brought in for questioning, and the deceased’s daughter. Also related is the story of the doctor who performed the autopsy. Each interview is not only another perspective on Khalil, but also the story of their life and, from their diverse experiences, a picture of life in an ordinary Beirut neighborhood is formed. Corruption, compromise, and crime form the backdrop against which these people try to survive.

I found it hard to put this book down, despite my usual avoidance of the murder mystery genre, and that is because the book is more about people caught in a vise of violence than it is about who killed Khalil. I was caught up in the lives of these people and in the theme Khoury weaves about the inanity and uselessness of war and violence in general. Parts of the book made for grim reading, but I was also inspired by the resilience and fortitude of these ordinary people. I would highly recommend White Masks as an introduction to the literature of Elias Khoury.½

The reviews of this book have been so laudatory that I began reading fully expecting to be swept away. Unfortunately, the only thing to be swept was the book, as I pushed it aside for something more readable. Months later, I began again and ground my way through the first forty pages, refusing to give up. The book did get easier to digest; it’s not a book I will read again, however.

Why so difficult? Khoury wrote the book as a stream of consciousness narration, with all the associative leaps and bounds of human thought. Stories are interrupted by other thoughts, the past and the present become interchanged, and the reader is left with a montage of images formed by the onslaught of storytelling. After a certain point, Khoury’s writing stabilizes a bit, and the reader has pieced together enough of the story to be able to follow along. Some stories are then told in a linear fashion, but those of the two main characters spiral around never ending and never seeming to find resolution.

The book is comprised of a young man’s internal monologue as he sits at the bedside of his aged mentor and father figure, Yunes. Khalil talks aloud, hoping that his voice will bring the old man out of his stroke-induced coma. He talks about what is happening in his life and reflects on how he ended up living in a derelict hospital, afraid he will be killed if he leaves, yet knowing the situation cannot continue indefinitely. But mostly Khalil tries to put together the things that he knows about Yunes, in an attempt to create a story that explains the old Palestinian freedom fighter’s life and his relationship with his wife. Along the way, Khalil tells the stories of countless others: the Palestinian midwife living out her life in a Jordanian refugee camp, a Jewish woman living in a house taken from the Palestinian woman who visits her, French actors who visit the camp hoping to improve a play they are doing on the massacre that took place there, the young Gazan fighter who learns his mother is Jewish.

The stories loosely hang together by themes which appear and reappear throughout the book. Primarily it is a book about the inanity of war and the cycles of violence that perpetuate a situation in which neither side can win. War is examined from both the general sense and the particulars of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Why do young men fight and die for a country in which they have never lived? Why does Yunes risk his life over and over to visit his family, rather than bring his family to Jordan? Why do Jews treat the Palestinians in ways that eerily resemble 1930’s Germany?

Others may find the patchwork of discombobulated stories a fascinating look at the situation of Palestinian exiles in Jordan and the themes a literary treasure hunt. Personally, I found the book exhausting. It was like reading [Ulysses] without a concordance. My recommendation? Read Khoury’s later book, [White Masks], instead.

This poetic novel is set in a neighborhood in Beirut during the Lebanese civil war, and is narrated by three men: an Arabic soldier in the Lebanese National Movement; a government employee caught in the middle of the crisis; and an intelligent and idealistic young man who is also participating in the conflict. I found the narrative difficult to follow, as it was often surrealistic and at times overly repetitive, and I skimmed the last half of the book.

Normally, "fog of war" refers to the ambiguity and confusion encountered by military men, from commanders through ground soldiers, combatants during a war or battle. Yet the fog can envelop more than the military. There is also a fog of uncertainty and confusion in a city under siege or its inhabitants. Lebanese novelist Elias Khoury takes readers to that level in The Journey of Little Gandhi, a view of the life of average individuals in Beirut during the Lebanese civil war.

Khoury's style creates that fog of war sense. The pivot point of the story is Little Gandhi, or Abd Al-Karim, a shoe shine who is shot down in the street when the Israeli Army entered the city in September 1982. Much of his story -- and that of many others -- is relayed by Alice, an aging prostitute who is actually the main subject in which the narrator is interested. At least 30 different characters make an appearance, from an American University professor to an Episcopal priest to drug traffickers to Alice and Little Gandhi.

This melange means that regardless of whose particular story is being told at the moment and who may be relating it, we are presented a kaleidoscopic, multi-layered tale. One story flows into another story, akin to a person's thought process moving unconsciously from one topic to another to another. Likewise, these stories can be firsthand accounts or hearsay four times removed. Just as in war and its aftermath, the truth, such as it is, can be difficult to discern. Yet this also presents difficulty for many readers.

By necessity, Khoury's literary approach is confusing or labyrinthine, with no consistent linear narrative. To the contrary, The Journey of Little Gandhi is structured so as to render the narrative unstable and ambiguous. Yet that is the essence of the fog of war. Differing reports come from differing people. Motives and movements are confused. Uncertainty and confusion impact lives and decisions. That is exactly what is happening to the people of Beirut in Khoury's tale. It is a city split between and among factions. "Everything in it fell apart." So, rather than just wars and rumors of war, Khoury is telling us of lives and even rumors of life.

Originally published in Arabic in 1989, the book, translated by Paula Haydar, was published in the U.S. in 1994. Those familiar with Western categorizations of genres may call the book, now in newly released trade paper edition, so-called "magical realism." Khoury, however, rejects that classification. There is no need for magical realism in Lebanese literature, he told one interviewer, because life in Lebanon was itself unreal and fantastic. In such circumstances, he says, literature "must put together two elements: seeing and inventing; it must tell the truth and lie; it must combine the real and the fantastic at the same level and at the same moment."

The Journey of Little Gandhi certainly does that as it takes us on journey through recent Lebanese history. The question is whether readers will take the time on the journey to peel back the layers and try to grasp both reality and unreality.

(Originally posted at A Progressive on the Prairie.)

This book takes place mainly in Beirut, during the Lebanese Civil War in the 1970’s. It does not have a typical “plot”, but rather it describes a series of incidents involving the narrator. These include some memories of his youth, before the war, some of his experiences during the war, both as a soldier and a civilian, and an encounter with an old acquaintance later on (I think), in Paris.

The main interest and real power of the book, though, comes from the style rather than from the content alone. The style changes in response to the situation the narrator is in, internally as well as external. So, in the earliest section, describing his youth and the area of Beirut he lived in, the descriptions are coherent. This is followed by repeated and slightly varying descriptions of soldiers searching his house looking for him after he had already, the reader infers, left to join a rebel group. The next section describes scenes from the war itself – running through streets, firing and being fired at, hiding in a church, comrades being injured and killed. This section is more chaotic, reflecting the chaos of war and also his confused and stressed thinking, and the remaining sections get more and more disjointed, with seemingly random thoughts, memories, hallucinations mixed together with straightforward descriptions.

But nothing in his world is straightforward anymore, and the book reflects that. Whenever the narrator tries to do something “normal” – go out to find bread, or water, or drive some friends home from a café, or park his car, or talk about the war with his friend in Paris, images and memories intervene, distorting the narrative and distancing the reader from events just as the narrator’s mind is distanced. I sometimes found it too surreal, and had difficulty understanding the allusions, but sometimes the style worked wonderfully to portray the sense of confusion and dislocation. One particularly strong short section describes the terror of walking with his wife and four small children down the four or five flights of stairs from his apartment to a shelter in the basement, in pitch dark, with shells exploding around them. Another conveys through a series of conversations and descriptions his incomprehension when his car, parked outside his house, is destroyed in the fighting – he just can’t believe no one will fix it, or pay for it, or even consider it an important event.

My knowledge of the politics of Lebanon in the ‘70’s, and of Lebanese culture in general, is very limited, so I am undoubtedly missing a lot of references that more knowledgeable readers will pick up. On the simpler level of describing how it feels to live in the middle of chaos, as an active participant or a bystander, I really did get it. The writing shows you the disintegration rather than just telling you it happened, and this is a great achievement.

Highly recommended.½

[White Masks] by Elias Khoury is a really interestingly put together book. Written by a journalist trying to find answers to the death of an elderly man who was found naked and beaten on a street in Lebanon. What he did was to interview various people who had some form of contact with the man while he was alive, both when he was a sane and happy man, and then later when he seemed to have descended into his own private mental hell of insanity. With each interview, we receive not just a different look at the man, but also insights into these different people and their lives during Lebanon's wars. These stories are funny, sensitive, disturbing and touching ... and all seek somehow to explain the life of the murdered man.

Very well written as a translated work and worth the time to read it as well.½

Elias Khoury (1948-) was born to a Lebanese Christian family and lived for many years in Beirut, including the years of the Lebanese civil war (1975-1990), in which as many as 250,000 civilians were killed and over a million were injured, half with debilitating and lifelong injuries. The war involved multiple factions, including Palestinians displaced from their homeland after the creation of the state of Israel, Lebanese Christians, Syrians, Israeli and American military forces, and smaller groups and militias. The conflict was notable for shifting alliances and betrayals, and nonaligned civilians often found themselves accused by one faction of abetting another one, based on family ties and old friendships. Corruption was rampant, and traditional roles and social customs were ignored, as those who had guns and money ruled over besieged communities.

This novel was originally published in 1981 in Arabic, translated into English by Maia Taber, and released by Archipelago Books last month.

In White Masks, Khoury uses the murder of Khalil Ahmad Jaber, an ordinary civilian with no known enemies or suspicious alliances, as a vehicle to describe the lives of those affected by the Lebanese civil war in 1980. Several family members, neighbors, and others who have come into contact with him are interviewed to learn more about this senseless killing, and we come to learn about the hardships, despair and frustrations that plague civilians caught between the shifting factions. The following excerpt effectively characterizes the views of the average person:

What is happening to us is very strange...One wonders if it is the result of unexplained mental disorders...No one is able to control all the crime...It's grown into an epidemic, a plague devouring us from within...I suppose that is what is meant by social fragmentation in civil conflicts—I've read about it, but somehow this seems different...you'd think they positively savored murder, like a sip of Coke. Poor Khalil Jaber! But it's not just him...he, at least, has found his rest...what about the rest of us, the Lord only knows how we will die...

Khoury effectively uses several metaphors throughout the book, to describe the decay and breakdown in Lebanese society, and the accounts of the characters provide vivid descriptions of the effects of the war on those who survive the daily carnage. White Masks is a stunning and essential literary achievement, which nearly reaches the brilliance of his later novel Gate of the Sun.½

In White Masks a journalist—who may be Khoury, himself, we are never sure—sets out to discover who committed the seemingly senseless murder of Khalil Ahmad Jaber. He tells us in the preface that he won't solve the murder. In fact, he tells us that the murder isn't even very interesting: "So I'm setting out to tell this story, which is really not a story, as the discriminating reader might observe, and which I know might well be of absolutely no interest to anyone." And so it goes, for, truthfully, the story of the murder isn't a story and it isn't particularly engaging.

But, it serves as a vehicle. Tied to it are threads arising out of the lives of five people connected with the victim. Their stories intertwine around the murder, leading the reader from one to the next, and their sum is a portrait of Beirut in the summer of 1980. Like a tree, these five main limbs branch out into a myriad of small stories, drawing in other characters that have no connection with Jaber for their piece of the picture: having to abandon a wounded comrade during a battle, dealing with the predatory extortion gangs, a garbage collector facing the simple impossibility of collecting garbage properly. These are interesting...in fact, they are engrossing.

The picture they paint is of a country tired of war, but almost unable to imagine any other state. There is no sense that Khoury is taking sides in this conflict, only that he is recording the pain, disillusionment, and despair that are the reality of war regardless of causes or ideologies. The pull of these stories causes the reader to forget utterly about the murder, except when forcibly reminded by the narrator, to focus on the everyday lives affected by an interminable and meaningless conflict. The passion in this translation...and surely in the original...is impossible to ignore.½

In this early novella by the acclaimed Lebanese author, a wandering man travels to a faraway city in order to lead a life of luxury, surrounded by beautiful mistresses and provided with the finest clothes and perfumes. However, when he arrives to the walled city of Beirut he is unable to find a proper entrance. After an extensive search, he eventually encounters several young and mysterious women, each of whom offer to permit him to enter the city alone, and to meet him inside at the city square. After initially refusing these gestures, he eventually agrees to the gesture from the last woman that he meets. Once inside, he discovers that the city is nearly deserted, and that the town square is bare, except for the coffin of the deceased king and the sounds of wailing from an unknown source. He is unable to find any of the women he met previously, and after walking aimlessly in circles, he cannot find a way out of the town or anyone who can help him. He decides to return to the square, where he eventually meets the women and the entombed king, who share stories about what has happened to the town, and themselves.

I found City Gates to be an easy and pleasurable book to read, but I didn't understand the message that Khoury was trying to convey.

Extraordinàri

Having fairly recently read Elias Khoury's brilliant 'Gate of the Sun' I have since been looking forward to reading his 'Yalo'. A somewhat shorter work and not as wide thematically--it does however share some of the same concerns. Set mostly in or around Khoury's native Beirut Lebanon--Yalo is a somewhat confused young man from a broken home who suffers identity problems. Raised by his mother (Gaby) and his maternal grandfather (Abel or Ephraim--the religious name he's taken) --whether his real father is her mother's legal husband who had abandoned them both before his birth or he was born out of wedlock the son of a local dressmaker is part of the confusion he feels. The shopkeeper is chased off by his grandfather who raises Yalo (or Daniel Abel Abyad or Daniel J'alo) very strictly with the idea of having Yalo follow in his footsteps to become a kind of priest for the christian sect he leads. Yalo as a teenager however runs off to join a militia fighting for Palestinian rights only to later desert--along with another soldier they steal their units payroll and escape to France. His friend however takes all the money and leaves him abandoned in Paris with no cultural references and not able to speak he's hardly able to communicate. He is rescued by a Lebanese businessman and gunrunner--a christian like himself who brings him back to Beirut--giving him a job as a caretaker and bodyguard to his wife. The businessman is often away and his frustrated and lonely wife begins an affair with Yalo. This breaks off eventually and Yalo falls in love with another Lebanese lady Shirin who he bullies and hounds relentlessly. Still working as a caretaker he's noticed that cars often stop on the perimeter of the estate. At first suspecting that they are spying on his boss--he soon realizes that it's just a locale where men take women to have sexual relations. He begins spying on them--and then later interrupting these outings to rob them and occasionally he rapes one of the women. Note here that in Lebanon these trysts are very illegal and the participants are shy about such activities being scrutinized by the police. As luck would have it however his affair with Shirin having broken up he happens upon her one night in the same spot--and the ensuing episode is the event that leads to his arrest.

Arrested by the police with Shirin testifying against him--he is beaten and tortured. Because of some of his previous associations while he was in the commando unit--the police believe him to be more than just a rapist and robber. They want his entire life story from beginning to end and they go to extreme measures to get it--extreme enough in any case to literally split his personality--one part of him experiencing an almost out of body sensation while the other pleads and cooperates. He is not exactly who they think he is--someone connected to terrorism--and in the end finally having proof of that he gets a ten year sentence for rape and robbery.

Khoury is a brilliant writer. He has a keen eye for detail and constructs very imaginative plots which are not only realistic in tone and substance but which are permeated with psychological insight. He has a gift also for tying signature moments or events together. Both Yalo and the Gate of the Sun are a pleasure to read and always thought provoking. These more recent works of his are more fleshed out than earlier works and the maturity of this writer is very evident--his works only getting better with time. He ranks as my favorite Middle Eastern writer and I'd recommend both of the books mentioned in this review very highly.½

Hailed as "the first magnum opus of the Palestinian saga," Gate of the Sun (2006) by Elias Khoury is my (tardy) Around the World for a Good Book selection for March. This epic novel features the narrator, Dr. Khalil telling stories to the comatose Yunes, a veteran of the conflicts with Israel seen as a hero to his people. I didn't catch on to this myself, but a review in the New York Times relates the telling of stories to keep someone alive to the classic Arabic tale "A Thousand and One Nights."

This novel is challenging to read both because of it's stream-of-consciousness narrative as well as the grim details of its subject matter. Khalil tells stories of his own life, stories about Yunes, stories of their families, and friends and villagers they know. The narrative stretches from the 1940's to the 1990's, punctuated by the historic conflicts with Israel. War, death, poverty, oppression, misery, and hopelessness flavor many of the tales. Their village is victim of massacres and their people commit their own atrocities. Not all of the novel is so dismal though, there are humorous stories, tales of love and love lost, and perseverance despite it all.
I have to confess that I know far too little of the Palestinian-Israeli conflict, and with more knowledge of that history I could appreciate this book better. On the other hand, this very personal tale is a good background for studying the history. Of all the Around the World for a Good Book novels I've read thus far, this one may be the closest to speaking for a people at the present time.
Favorite Passages
I won't describe the darkness to you, because I hate describing things. Ever since I was in school I've hated describing things. The teacher would give us an essay to write: Describe a rainy day. And I wouldn't know how, because I hate comparing things. Things can only be described in their own terms, and when we compare them, we forget them. A girl's face is like a girl's face and not like the moon. The whiteness and roundness of everything else are different. When we say that a girl's face is like the moon, we forget the girl. We make the description so that we can forget, and I don't like to to forget. Rain is like rain, isn't that enough? Isn't it enough that it should rain for us to smell the smell of winter? - p. 68

Got you! I've got you now, and it's up to me to decipher what you said. Everything needs translating. Everything that's said is a riddle or a euphemism that needs to be interpreted. Now I must reinterpret you from the beginning. I'll take apart your disjointed phrases to see what's inside them and will but you back together to get at your truth.
Can I get at your truth?
What does your truth mean?
I don't know, but I'll discover things that had never crossed my mind. - p. 398

Why are all your stories like that?
How could you stand this life?
These days we cans stand it because of video; Abu Kamal was right -- we've become a video nation. Umm Hassan brought me a tape of al-Ghabsiyyeh, and some other woman brough a tape of another village -- all people do is swap videotapes, and in these images we find the strength to continue. We sit in front of the small screen and see small spots, distorted pictures and close-ups, and from these we invent the country we desire. We invent our life through pictures. - p. 462

Reviews
Village Voice
Mother Jones

A kind of modern day Paletinian version of the Odyssey filtered through the Arabian nights. Focused around one Khalil Ayyoub--an-ex Fedayeen fighter turned doctor/nurse and his uncle Yunes a brain damaged guerilla fighter lying in a coma in a virtually deserted hospital in the Shatila camp outside Beirut. As Yunes wastes away Khalil continues to hopelessly nurse him back to health--re-telling the histories of their lives and those of their friends and relatives. Khalil believes through persistence that he can revive his uncle and his stories go back in time to a different Palestine--a peaceful one which is shattered by war and expulsion.

Going back to the present the hospital is threatened with being shut down altogether and Khalil is stuck in a struggle with the remaining administration led by a Dr. Amjad--pressuring him to let his hopeless case of Yunes to die. The end is inevitable.

This is a not a novel that can be breezed through. It is lengthy and the stories are not set in any chronological order--jumping back and forth from past to present. Between the stories Khoury works in much psychological insight--and a history that slants towards the Palestinian view of their conflict with what has become the Israeli state. In this respect the Israeli army and paramilitary units like the Palmach and the Stern gang are presented not in an ideological sense but almost as forces of nature blowing into a village like a tornado and destroying everything in its path. There is no reasoning with natural forces such as these--later on if one is lucky enough to survive one picks up the pieces and tries to start over again. Khoury's prose is elegant and almost always reflective--by its nature his prose puts the brakes on anyone's attempt to speedread through it--one has to give it time. As much as it is a novel about the Palestinian diaspora it is also a story about a love for the small village life of Galilee--and all the area bordering southern Lebanon. It is a novel--not just about those shattered by war, but the loss of a way of life--a way very unlikely to return. Khoury writes hauntingly lyrical prose when writing about the village life and the country scenes surrounding it.

I expect that there will be some who might not like this--who might not feel comfortable with the angle presented. I would caution those with hardened views on the subject from any particular side to look at it not as propaganda or as justification for the many years of violence that continue to ravage the region. To my mind it is a beautifully rendered work of art first and foremost and to my mind it rates as a masterpiece of storytelling with some very brilliant insight into the psychology of cultural identity. Very highly recommended.

I read this for a lit class, so it will benefit from me having lower expectations as far as my enjoyment goes (and thus making it easier to impress me by being slightly enjoyable), but suffers from the fact we were made to read it at an ungodly speed that didn't lend itself well to getting used to the writing style or keeping stories and history straight.

This novel has some very nice writing and interesting stories. It's good to keep in mind that the novel was originally written in a different language and geared at an audience more familiar with the history of Palestine and the conflict there than many people in the US, so while you can still get a sense of things by simply reading it, if you don't like to feel a little lost, you may want to read up on the subject before starting. There are A LOT of names and stories, but I think it's also important to know that you don't necissarily have to keep track of all of them, many will not appear in important roles more than once. I think these are meant to be more the stories of the people of Palestine than the stories of particular characters.

Still, though this book gives a very important and underrepresented view point, the writing style was often difficult to wade through. Constantly changing view points, constant jumps about in time and space, narration styled after a person conversationally recounting stories to another. And then you couple that with the hoards of characters and history I am not all that intimately familiar with. Personally, the first third or half was very difficult as I adjusted to it, so much that I couldn't really take in a lot of the good things about the book as I was so frustrated. I can see the importance the style plays in the book, and it did get easier after the initial half, but that doesn't really make it any more pleasant to get through.

I'm positive a lot of my frustration stems from not being as familiar with the location and situation as the target audience, and most importantly the frustratingly small amount of time I was given to read it. I didn't love this book, but I wouldn't actually want to dissuade people who are interested in it from reading it. Instead, I think I'd rather say 'read up on the history if being a little lost irks you like it does me, and read at your own relaxed pace.' It's not something I'd have chosen to read myself, but it has its interesting side if you give yourself time to soak it up.

One of the most valuable lessons of my adult life has been realizing that the history we learn in school is just one point of view. As Elias Khoury writes, "I'm scared of history that has only one version. History has dozens of versions, and for it to ossify into one leads only to death." In Gate of the Sun, Khoury tells of Arab - Israeli conflict from a Palestinian perspective.

Khalil Ayyoub is a doctor caring for a man named Yunes, his mentor and father figure who has fallen into a coma after a stroke. Although the hospital director has declared Yunes will not recover, Khalil maintains a bedside vigil, talking to Yunes in the desperate hope that this will bring him back. Khalil recounts Yunes' youth prior to the formation of the Israeli state in 1948, the displacement of Palestinians, and Yunes' work as a freedom fighter from that point onwards. Yunes is forced to live apart from his wife, Nahila, and their children, because he will be killed if found. His rendezvous with Nahila take place in a cave near their village, the only place they can spend time together. They lived this way for years, with Nahila bearing several children and raising them on her own.

Khalil also tells stories of his own life, including his love for a woman named Shams, who is a sudden victim of the violence surrounding them. Shams' story, and that of their relationship, unfolds gradually throughout the novel. The book proceeds with Khalil sitting by Yunes' bedside weaving tales day after day for nearly seven months. Through these stories we gain an understanding of this period in history as seen by Palestinians; a very different perspective from that of the US government and media.

Khoury writes beautiful, descriptive prose: "A woman walking alone through the rubble of her village looking for the stones that were once her house. A woman alone, her head covered with a black scarf, hunched up in that emptiness that stretches all the way to God, among the hills and valleys of Galilee, within the circle of a red sun that crawls over the ground, passing slowly and carrying with it the shadows of all things." Yet I found the stream of consciousness style a bit difficult to follow, and had trouble keeping names, places, and events straight. In the end, I was ready to finish this book so I could get on to my next read.

Death's a long sleep from which one wakes not
And sleep's a short death from which one must rise.
- Abu el-A'la el-Ma'ari