Elias Khoury

During the aftermath of the 1948 Arab-Israel War, the residents of the city of Lydda (now Lod) were forced to leave their homes. Later, those homes would house Jewish refugees, themselves displaced from their homes in Bulgaria. But a few Arabs, Muslim and Christian, stayed behind in Lydda and were gathered together into what the soldiers guarding them called a ghetto. Children of the Ghetto: My Name is Adam by Lebanese author Elias Khoury and translated by Humphrey Davies, tells the story of one boy, the first child born into this new version of Lydda.

The novel begins with a long introduction from a university professor in New York named Elias Khoury, who met Adam briefly and disliked him intensely, mostly because they shared a romantic interest in the same woman but also out of consternation. Adam Dannoun is the cook in a falafel restaurant, well-educated and well-spoken, but he speaks both Arabic and Hebrew like a native. When Adam dies, the woman brings a stack of notebooks to Elias. She had been instructed by Adam's will to destroy them, but finds herself unable to do so. Elias, upon reading the notebooks, initially wants to write a novel based on the contents, but decides instead to submit them as they are for publication.

What follows begins as what one might find in the private notebooks of a scholar, a series of abortive attempts at writing the story of a Yemeni poet during the time of the Caliphates, followed by a rambling entry about his life in general, but all of this is necessary to the meat of the novel, Khoury taking his time to set up ideas and the life of this first witness before leading into what life was like for the people who stayed behind in Lydda, after most of the people had fled.

This was a powerful and understated novel about a part of the world whose history I know too little about. Khoury's slow and meandering style was wonderful and I'll be reading more by this author.… (mer)

I cannot believe I am still reading this book! (Nearly a month later).
It churns and churns, repeating itself endlessly, maybe adding a little more detail with each telling.
And the torture, I hate reading about torture; maybe I have my head in the sand but it distresses me that people can be so cruel to each other.
Mind you, the main character isn't much better, he may be a product of the Lebanese Civil War, but he's a nasty piece of work too - a rapist who doesn't even realise that what he's doing is rape.

What I'm finding truly fascinating is that, by chance, I have two different translations and I keep swapping between the two. Humphrey Davis's version is very much more poetic, it has more of an Arabic feel to it, while Peter Theroux seems to write for a more Western audience, less flowery but sometimes too direct. I'd struggle to say which version I prefer and I'm definitely spending too much time comparing them.

Just under 100 pages to go and I guess I'm going to struggle through to the end now. The book group has been and gone, so I'm just doing this for myself(?!). I need to know how Yalo will end up, though I can't say I really care if he meets a grisly end.......

16th December and I finally finished. It didn't get any better, although someone from the book group promised me it would. If Elias Khoury's intention was to highlight the fate of the lost children of a generation, then I'm sure he would have benefited from taking the chance to spend more time with his characters actually on the streets. It seems to me that this endless repetition of Yalo's story just wastes the opportunity of having someone concentrate on your book.
I'm assured that Khoury's book 'Gate of the Sun' is a wonderful read, but I think it'll be a while before I come back for more of this.
2 starts just because I finished.… (mer)