February Book Club at Barbès

Join the editors of Archipelago for drinks and discussion at Barbès. We meet on the third Wednesday of each month at 6pm. Whenever possible, the organizers at Barbès try to pair our book club with a musical performance from a tradition tied to the book. Our pick for February is Elias Khoury’s first novel, On the Relations of the Circle, a mesmerizing tale of a young boy set on the eve of the Lebanese Civil War in 1975. 

An exquisite book, like a novel in a funhouse mirror, that reads like direct dictation from dream and nightmare alike. Written in sinuous, startling lines, every page displays Khoury’s signature keenness of perception about history, nation, and the self’s treacherous interior. This book is a crucial reminder that the world drawn askew can be the world drawn most precisely.— Elisa Gonzalez

Elias Khoury’s first novel, On the Relations of the Circle, exists within its own spacetime. Set on the eve of the Lebanese Civil War, gravity shifts in these pages, and the physics of the work follows that of dreams. Gorgeous and ethereal, this is a must read from a beloved master of Arabic fiction.— Hannah Lillith Assadi

The salient quality of this wonderful novel is not found in plot summary. Though the story of an orphan in ’70s Beirut is compelling, Khoury’s execution of how a consciousness emerges is brilliant and nearly peerless . . . I’ve only experienced this level of vivid and necessarily linked surreal imagery in Sergei Parajanov’s film The Color of Pomegranates. Just as every frame of that film could be a (powerful) painting, each image you will encounter [in On the Relations of the Circle] can be studied in order to reveal the larger wonder of awakened being. — The Brooklyn Rail

What a blessing to still get new Khoury books to read even after he’s gone . . . [On the Relations of the Circle] unfolds like the fragmented memories of childhood, tracing the orphan Mansour through his encounters with his world and surroundings, mystical and material. A gorgeous and poetic tale.— Samia Saliba, Mizna

Books are available for purchase here, and at Barbès a couple weeks ahead of our meeting.