White Masks

Elias Khoury's novel al-Wujuh al-Bayda (1981), translated as White Masks, but literally White Faces, tells a story made up of many voices, all related to each other through one central character, Khalil Ahmad Jaber, and focused on Beirut. The novel is something of a murder mystery, structured through the narrator's investigation of this death and …

Elias Khoury’s Gate of the Sun

Elias Khoury's Gate of the Sun opens with the death of the midwife Um Hassan in the Shatila refugee camp on the outskirts of Beirut. We are told everyone in the refugee camp called her mother, "because everyone born in the Shatila camp fell from their mother's guts into her hands." The narrator relates the …

The Journey of Little Gandhi

Elias Khoury's The Journey of Little Gandhi begins with the death of the hero in the first chapter, following which the storyteller, Alice, opens each of her stories in the remaining five chapters with a lament for his death. Alice said he died...Alice said she took him to the cemetry and she saw the people …

Elias Khoury’s Little Mountain

In the foreword to the translation of Little Mountain, Edward Said argues that Khoury's novel “in equal measure...derives and departs” from the Arabic novel, breaking with Naguib Mahfouz's realist style. As Said puts it “from this perspective Khoury’s work bids Mahfouz an inevitable and yet profoundly respectful farewell.” Said notes that in societies such as …

Kingdom of Strangers

Elias Khoury’s The Kingdom of Strangers (1996, Mamlakah al-Ghuraba 1993) is a slim book which interweaves the reflections of the narrator (identified with Khoury himself), the folk legend of the Lebanese monk Jurji Khairy, and the story of the  "Circassian" Widad.  These stories are retold by a narrator to us, and to two interlocutors, with …

Elias Khoury on Childhood and the Arab Revolutions

On September 17, acclaimed Lebanese novelist Elias Khoury spoke at the American University in Cairo as part of a series of lectures on "Aesthetics and Politics: Counter-Narratives, New Publics, and the Role of Dissent in the Arab World," which took place at AUC from Sep. 16-27.  Elias Khour gave his talk in Arabic under the …