Status
Available
Call number
Genres
Publication
Picador (2007), Paperback, 544 pages
Description
Gate of the Sun is the first magnum opus of the Palestinian saga. After their country is torn apart in 1948, two men remain alone in a deserted makeshift hospital in the Shatila camp on the outskirts of Beirut. We enter a vast world of displacement, fear, and tenuous hope. Khalil holds vigil at the bedside of his patient and spiritual father, a storied leader of the Palestinian resistance who has slipped into a coma. As Khalil attempts to revive Yunes, he begins a story, which branches into many. Stories of the people expelled from their villages in Galilee, of the massacres that followed, of the extraordinary inner strength of those who survived, and of love. Khalil--like Elias Khoury--is a truth collector, trying to make sense of the fragments and various versions of stories that have been told to him. His voice is intimate and direct, his memories are vivid, his humanity radiates from every page. Khalil lets his mind wander through time, from village to village, from one astonishing soul to another, and takes us with him. Gate of the Sun is a Palestinian Odyssey. Beautifully weaving together haunting stories of survival and loss, love and devastation, memory and dream, Khoury humanizes the complex Palestinian struggle as he brings to life the story of an entire people.… (more)
User reviews
LibraryThing member lriley
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
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.
Show More
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.
Show Less
LibraryThing member John
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)
Show More
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)
Show Less
LibraryThing member lauralkeet
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
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.
Show More
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.
Show Less
LibraryThing member labfs39
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
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.
Show More
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.
Show Less
LibraryThing member narwhaltortellini
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
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.
Show More
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.
Show Less
LibraryThing member weeksj10
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
Show More
was an okay book that could have been very good, if the writing wasn't so clunky. Show Less
LibraryThing member KrisR
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
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.
Show More
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.
Show Less
LibraryThing member AmourFou
Lyrical, haunting and unforgettable.
Subjects
Awards
Saif Ghobash Banipal Prize (Winner — 2006)
The New York Times Notable Books of the Year (Fiction & Poetry — 2006)
San Francisco Chronicle Best Book of the Year (Fiction — 2006)
Christian Science Monitor Best Book (General Fiction — 2006)
Language
Original publication date
2006 (English translation)
1998
Physical description
531 p.; 8.28 inches
ISBN
0099461595 / 9780099461593