Gate of the Sun

Occasionally you come across a great book by a great author and after reading 10-15 pages you realize that you could never write a novel like this, the prose, the detail, the character development are simply outstanding. After finishing the book you sit and reflect on it a bit and recognize that it has, in some greater or lesser manner, changed your world view forever. The novel has left you with images you will never forget. Elias Khoury's novel Gate of the Sun is this type of novel. Future generations will speak of Khoury in the same breathe with Zola, Dickens, and Dostoevsky. Gate of the Sun is a story about the Nakba (or Catastrophe) that occurred in 1948 when the state of Israel was formed and the Palestinian people were scattered to the winds: some to life as second class citizens in Israel, many forced into ghettos in Gaza and the West Bank, and many other scattered throughout Lebanon, Jordan, and rest of the Muslim world. The story begins as a famous Palestinian freedom fighter lay in a coma dying in a hospital outside Beirut. A close friend sits with him day and night and spends the next seven months recounting stories from their lives. What follows is a recounting of the Palestinian experience from the Nakba through the '67 war, Black September, the Lebanon War, and the massacres at Sabra and Shatila. We learn about life in refugee camps, the struggle of the freedom fighters, how the Israelis drove the Palestinians out of their villages and homes before and after '48. In short, we learn about the peregrinations and vicissitudes of the Palestinian people. This story isn't told in a linear fashion. There are jumps in both time and space as various episodes in both characters lives are revisted, and stories that were told to them by others recounted. We learn about all aspects of the Palestinian condition, big and small. The tales range from domestic disputes, love affairs, and parent-children stories to tragic tales of expulsion in '48 and genocide in '82. One of the great strengths of this book is that it is not simply a paean to the Palestinians. Khoury recounts many episodes that are not particularly flattering to the Palestinians. This is not an easy book to read. Although the style is very different, I would compare it to the works of Gabriel Garcia Marquez in that it will take a bit of discipline to get through (this is definitely not a beach read). The only negative comment I can make about this book is that it is, in some ways, too bad that this book is so difficult to work through. I wish that this novel was more approachable by the average reader in the United States (not that Khoury was necessarily writing for these people). Any Westerner who reads this book cannot possibly look at the Arab-Israeli conflict in the same light. We have been conditioned to view the Israelis as the victims, after reading this book, you would be hard pressed to hold this view ever again. Finally, on one quasi-political note

Really a wonderful read - Khoury gives us the people inside the statistics. Reading "700,000 refugees" doesn't make the average person feel much, but Gate of the Sun gives us the individual faces and stories that make it all real. Other reviewers mentioned the artifice in the structure; I found it a touch annoying at first, then very appropriate as the book went along. Given the quality of the novel and the importance of the topic, I am surprised this novel has received only five reviews - are so few people reading this book?

This is an extraordinary story, essentially a personalized account of the history of the Palestinians of Galilee since the Zionist immigrations -- certainly, after the genocide of the Jews in the 1940s, the cruelest assault on a people in the 20th century (though the Armenian genocide too is right up there if one is counting), and it continues today in all its horror. The story is hung on an initially irritating conceit, one man's monologue as he cares for a mentor who has suffered a stroke and is brain dead. The protagonist imagines that his charge can hear and comprehend him. But as the story progresses, the immediacy of the reality of the intertwining biographies and the awful -- and often beautiful -- story they tell is so engaging that the irritation passes. But what also makes this novel extraordinary is that it is told without rancor -- not that hatred wasn't swirling around and everpresent. The people are real, that world is real, the suffering and death are real. It is this, and the opening of a window on that world heretofore glimpsed only on the news, that is the beauty of this book. There were occasional and brief what seemed to me trite pop-philosophical digressions, but they did not seriously affect the power of the reading. Some episodes seem to be present to emphasize that the author is not anti-Jewish, but they feel contrived. In this feverish situation it is no doubt a good thing to emphasize an author's rejection of anti-Semitic prejudice, but one would hope the author could find a way that feels as real as the rest of the book. Well, truth to tell, there was one subplot that stretched credulity in the interest of creating an artful story. Nonetheless, this is a truly powerful book, and the reality of that world comes through despite the occasional novelistic artifice. How to right the wrongs and avoid further horrors for either peoples! But Gate of the Sun is a resolutely non-political novel about individuals -- largely unheard from individuals caught up in the maelstrom of the 20th century's awful story.

If was there one epic,one literary saga and masterpiece deserving of the tragedy, brutality, betrayal, strength and also beauty that is the Palestinian cause, it is this book. Every page is filled with humanity,regret,passion and the myth that ordinary people fashion for their cause, the myth they need to fashion in order to survive in a world that doesn't care. It is a story of men and women, of love that exists only unfulfilled, of death and self betrayal and the answers that will never be told, that can not be told. There is cruelty and injustice, yet among all the people who have lost their masks, victims and perpetrators, there is no true evil. There is love, yet no one enjoying its bliss without being eluded by its fragility. It is a world of massacres, of lime stained nameless corpses, of heroes turned mad and hair turned white early, but also of beauty, strength and hope that can not die, even in the filth and sorrow stained alleys of a refugee camp. In other words, it is our world. Yunes, an unflinching hero of the Palestinian resistance,man of countless sacrifices and mentor to forty year old Dr. Khalil,a warm thoughtful man who was among the fedayeen in Lebanon and refused to leave Beirut in 1982, has fallen into a coma. In the almost empty corridors of the neglected Galilee Hospital of the Shatila camp,it is up Khalil to care for him when everyone else has in one way or the other surrendered.They can not understand why Khalil would care so tenderly for what they call a corpse. In a world turned up side down by endless war, they have learned to leave it to God. Not so Dr. Khalil. His refusal to let Yunes be taken home in order to die is his way of paying back his debts and showing his respect and devotion to the man. At the side of Yunes bed he holds a long inner monologue with his friend, who in many ways is still a riddle to him. His admiration for the sacrifices that Yunes has given to the cause that is Palestine does not betray Khalils thirst for answers, for truth in a world of countless conflicting stories. "Tell me- you know better than I do- do we all lie like that? Did you lie to me to?" he asks his silent friend without expecting an answer. Khalils thirst for truth is also personal; the uncertainty of his former lover Shams feelings toward him is torturing. He does not understand why this passionate, yet haunted woman, slept with him. He does not know why she betrayed him and can not understand why she had to die, yet he can forgive her. "I waited, not to understand what she had done, but because I loved her. It no longer made any difference to me whether she had been unfaithful or not. She was what mattered not, me." His long stays in the hospital are also an escape from the feared revenge of Shams family and especially from Shams ghost haunting his unfulfilled longing. In the centre of the mosaic of tragic, humorous and horrifying stories, such as the story of the Palestinian midwife Umm Hassan, a refugee from 1948, who

The following review in the NY Times is a good review of the novel. I strongly recommend. Whether you are Jewish, Muslim, Christian, Arab or American, a must read. New York Times Review by LORRAINE ADAMS Published: January 15, 2006 TO Americans, the novel in Arabic remains on the margins. Nonfiction devoted to the Arab world may be in demand, but interest in Arab literature, even after Naguib Mahfouz's Nobel Prize in 1988, hasn't moved too far past Aladdin and Sinbad. Skip to next paragraph Maria Söderberg Elias Khoury GATE OF THE SUN Elias Khoury is one of a handful of contemporary Arab novelists to have gained a measure of Western attention. He is also one of the few to write about the Palestinian experience, albeit from the perspective of an outsider. As a Christian born in Beirut in 1948, at the moment of Israel's inception, Khoury was too young to know firsthand the events that "Gate of the Sun" encompasses. Unlike the Palestinian novelists Emile Habibi and Ghassan Kanafani, who were born earlier in the century, Khoury could not rely on his own memory. To write this novel, he spent considerable time in the camps - more accurately, concrete exurban slums - throughout the Middle East, interviewing Palestinian refugees. Narrated by a peasant doctor talking to a comatose, aging fighter, "Gate of the Sun" relates a swirl of stories: of grandmothers and grandfathers, midwives and children, wives and lovers - the lucky and the hapless, the mad and the hopeful. Employing a strategy that's an inversion of "A Thousand and One Nights" (whose narrator, Scheherazade, tells stories to save herself), Khalil half believes that these stories are keeping his dying friend Yunes alive. Between November 1947 and October 1950, some 700,000 Palestinians fled or were forced to flee their homes as the British departed and the Israelis took control. Disputed and complicated, the refugee problem has been a sticking point in more than five decades of war, terrorism and failed peace talks. But while Khoury's narrator explores Palestinian privation and Israeli cruelty, this is not a predictable novel of despair and accusation. It contains, for example, a story about the madwoman of Al Kabri, a reputed bone collector who actually searches for wild chicory. There is a wedding-night farce involving a cotton swab. And a dark story of infanticide - and pita bread. Khalil assembles these vignettes with a clumsy talent, digressing as often as he gets to the point. His moods are many. One minute, he's swooning about a French actress, the next he's saddened by the antics of a shampoo seller. He crows about Yunes's wife telling Israeli interrogators she's a whore in order to hide Yunes's whereabouts. And he gives another man's wife the last word on what happened to his prized buffaloes: "I'm certain the Jews didn't kill them. . . . Why would they kill them? They'd take them. And how could they have killed the buffalo and not him with them? No, the Jews didn't kill the