Elias Khoury (1948–2024)

Set during and around the years of war in Lebanon, it presents a meandering tale whose supposed purpose is to determine who killed an older man in a neighborhood. However, the real purpose seems to be to show you the confusions, justifications, brutalities, kindnesses, look-the-other-way attitudes, privations, duties, myths, life-goes-on-even-amid-death-and-war activities, heartbreaks, shifting morals, & so on that happen to a regular populace during a wartime situation. It's not really a show more linear story, almost more of an out-loud conversation with a variety of everyday people, stream-of-consciousness ramblings about their lives.... Haunting, especially when you think of the many humans caught up in wars at this very minute. This could be your story. Or mine. Or of the stranger halfway around the world. show less

I received this as part of the Early Reviewers program, back in 2012, and I finally read it. Why so long? It was a challenging fever dream of a book for me. I started and stopped several times. I find it difficult to give up on a book, though. Much of the book's first part feels liminal-- between vivid dreams of relationships and a dreamer in body who is disoriented and uses stream-of-consciousness. The reason for this becomes clear at the end, but no spoilers. I notice so much is seen show more through a veil, through fog, or in a state of dissolving, with narratives making u-turns. Dreams are essential to this book, often intense and prophetic, blending past and present, reality and imagination, often in a state of confusion and fear and haunted by a sense of danger and disconnection. Dreams blur the lines between past and present, childhood and adulthood. Yet there is something like faith, will, or prayer that clears such fog. The ambivalence towards the marriage at the center of the book is powerful and the entirety of the life of the protagonist is in the shadow of the 1948 battle of Jaffa and the disintegration of Palestinian culture as it once existed before this. Repeated imagery of eyes is loaded with symbolism throughout As Though She Were Sleeping. Elias Khoury boldly takes on ideas of divine abandonment related to the Naqba. In the way the book ends, I read Milia--the narrator-- not only as a singular subject but as a kind of figurative, collective motherly tragic stand-in for all of Palestine. show less

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 show more 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. show less

Keeping track of how many books I read each year, and writing about each one, is fun and challenging. The one downside though is that there may have been times, here and there, where I decided not to read a book because it was too long or dense and might mess up my numbers. I almost did that with this 531 page tome, but I'm glad I chose a good book over a higher number of books read.

Gate of the Sun focuses on the protagonist, Khalil. Khalil isn't a doctor, but he calls himself one and works show more in a hospital. He works with someone else who is an actual doctor, but instead of doctoring he just steals and sells medical equipment. Khalil is mostly taking care of someone whom he sometimes calls Father, sometimes Son, and other times by three or four other names. This person is in a coma, but Khalil refuses to admit that there's nothing to be done; instead he's convinced that if his father/son can just make it nine months, he'll be born again.

Khalil spends a lot of time talking to his father/son, recounting dozens of stories that he either experienced first hand or has heard from Yunes (one of the other names of the father/son) or other people he has come across. All the stories are about Palestine and Palestinians. They jump around a lot—from the '40s all the way til the '80s and from Lebanon to Syria to Palestine—but tell a very deep, sad, horrible, and beautiful tale of Palestine from the time Israel became a state.

While reading this book, I was also reading a book that talked about the nazi Holocaust, and I would find myself getting the stories mixed up in my head. It feels like the zionists took what they learned from the people who tried to erase their existence, and have been using it to erase a whole other people. Yet somehow books about the holocaust are in every bookstore and almost everyone I know has read at least one, while books like this very, very rarely appear anywhere that's easy to find.

Read this book. It's important, especially if you have trouble seeing certain humans as worth of life. show less