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Review by Anne Chisholm in the Sunday Telegraph for Gate of the Sun

Violence and blighted hopes

2006-01-15

With this long, demanding, powerful novel, Elias Khoury, Professor of Arabic Literature at New York University, born in Lebanon in 1948, presents the whole tragedy of Palestine through a tangle of individual stories. He shows how such stories, told and retold, become myths, how myths can inspire and also destroy, and how hard it is to discover, let alone tell, the truth.

His chief storyteller—the book is written in the first person—is a youngish man, Dr Khaleel, who works in a crumbling hospital in a refugee camp on the edge of Beirut. Khaleel spends his days and nights at the bedside of a comatose older man, Yunis, trying to keep him alive not just by devoted nursing but by reminding him of his life as one of the veteran leaders of Palestinian resistance. Khaleel’s task is hopeless, but he desperately needs to understand not just Yunis’s life but his own, which has also been determined by exile and war. Memory is the weapon with which he fights death.

It would be a mistake, however, to see this novel as fundamentally political or symbolic. It is not about abstractions, but about people. Khoury is not a propagandist; he, like Yunis, is always on the side of life.

Khaleel recalls many conversations with Yunis, in which his admired friend and mentor remains resolutely unheroic. ‘You were a hero, and you laughed at heroes,’ says Khaleel, as he recalls the savage story of how Yunis and his family were thrown out of their village in 1948 and how for the rest of his life Yunis fought the Israeli occupation and lived on the run, slipping back over the border to snatch time in a secret cave with Naheeleh, his beautiful wife.

Khoury’s account is based, apparently, on years of listening to exiles and refugees’ own stories of displacement, violence and blighted hopes. With this novel he celebrates not only the fighters but the women of Palestine, old and young, their anguish, their courage and their realism. Naheeleh speaks some of the most telling lines in the book: ‘Why did you promise you’d all come back?’ she asks Yunis. ‘Why did you make me believe you, even though you knew otherwise?’

The novel reads well (the translator is Humphrey Davies) but remains a challenge for anyone not familiar with Arab names and six decades of Middle-Eastern history. In the end, though, what stays in the mind is not a history lesson but the rich humanity of a wise and generous-spirited novel.

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