Praise
Elias Khoury is a pure storyteller. A writer who understands the hypnotic power of words, and who lets this power become the actual subject of his books. Of course, alongside the words, there is reality, palpable, sensuous, atrocious.
How to write Beirut? . . . with words and images that stumble with weariness, that collapse from the heat, from the stone which composes them only to crumble in turn? . . . This is why Khoury's fiction is so powerful. The intent of the writing is to restore the soul.
No Lebanese writer has been more successful than Elias Khoury in telling the story of Lebanon . . . Khoury is one of the most innovative novelists in the Arab world.
Khoury is the sort of novelist whose name is inseparable from a city. Los Angeles has Joan Didion and Raymond Chandler, and Istanbul Orhan Pamuk. The beautiful, resilient city of Beirut belongs to Khoury.
Powerful . . . Tantalizing. . . . Maia Tabet's translation from the Arabic is lucid and refreshing.
Khoury [is] arguably the finest living Arab novelist. . . . White Masks represents a turning point in Khoury's work. . . . A compelling, thoughtful read.
Khoury's story is rich in the detail of daily life, and together the telling of the cast's Rashoman-like tale weaves the web of a society deeply scarred by Beirut's bitter and protracted civil wars, along with the complex reality, unbelievable anecdotes, and deeply visceral survival instincts of its people.
The distinctly human trait of inhumanity is mixed and tempered with profound love and compassion in this haunting and highly affecting novel about a time and a place that many of us only have glimpsed on news programs.
It is in not only the art of his storytelling, the sometimes fractured thoughts that his skills come out, but his interest in the structure of the stories that come out of a war.
Who could resist such a quixotic quest, such a beguiling, seemingly humble narrator with, nonetheless, an array of tricks up his sleeve?
This is an artful novel, displaying all the elliptical storytelling evident in Khoury’s 1998 masterpiece Gate of the Sun.
Extras
Read Part One and Part Two of an overview of Elias Khoury’s writing and the process of literary translation.
Read about Elias Khoury’s relationship to his writing from a talk called “Translating Palestine.”
Watch and listen to a conversation with translator Humphrey Davies and André Naffis-Sahely.
Read an interview with Elias Khoury about the relationship between an author and his characters.
Read about Elias Khoury’s discussion of the Arab Spring from a child’s perspective.
Watch and listen as author Elias Khoury and translator Maia Tabet discuss White Masks.
Read Maia Tabet’s 12 Rules of Translation here.
Elias Khoury interviewed in Haaretz.
