Arabesques

From an acclaimed Lebanese writer, a novel about a Palestinian community split by the founding of Israel.

GATE OF THE SUN

A Novel

By Elias Khoury

Translated from the Arabic by Humphrey Davies

Archipelago. 539 pp. $26

The assassination of the former Lebanese prime minister Rafiq al-Hariri early last year conjured up the ghost of the long years of civil war. Between 1975 and 1990, Lebanon was a battlefield for local and regional powers and militias -- Lebanese, Palestinians, Syrians and Israelis. It seemed as if the border between life and death no longer existed, and no one felt immune from random and sudden catastrophe.

No Lebanese writer has been more successful than Elias Khoury in telling the story of Lebanon, and particularly Beirut, during that absurd game of death. Khoury is one of the most innovative novelists in the Arab world, and since his 1977 novel The Little Mountain , he has tried not simply to tell the story of the conflict's damage but to discover ways to tell it that match its meaninglessness and illogic.

Drawing inspiration from classical Arabic storytelling as well as the works of modern Western masters such as Faulkner, Nabokov, Calvino and Celine, Khoury in more than half a dozen novels has established a style that is self-conscious, chaotic, contradictory, circular and generally worthy of Beirut's civil war. This makes reading his work a bit of a challenge, but for those interested in both modern narrative and the politics of the Middle East, it's worth it.

In Gate of the Sun , published first in Arabic in 1998 and now rendered in a fine translation by Humphrey Davies, the narrator, Khalil, is aware that he is merely telling a story, but rather than making him detached, this awareness leaves him confused and willing to give up his role to any character ready to tell his own tale. The story or stories he tells are those of a man who has descended into a coma. In Galilee Hospital in a Palestinian refugee camp, Khalil sits by the deathbed of Yunes, his spiritual father and guide, and recites stories that Yunes had once told him.

In this book, Khoury stretches the narrative beyond his familiar territory. Gate of the Sun is not only the story of the civil war in Lebanon but also that of the Palestinian community of the Galilee -- a story that extends from the 1930s to the 1990s. After the war of 1948, the majority of the Galilee Palestinians sought refuge in Lebanon, while the rest remained and became Arab citizens of the newly founded state of Israel. At one of its several levels, the novel keeps rushing backward and forward between the two parts of the community, between northern Israel and the Palestinian refugee camps in Lebanon, and between the past and the present. It unravels the life of Yunes, who for decades has tried to overcome the split by making two families, one on each side of the divide, and living with both of them as if they belonged to one integral community. In reality, however, the only place in which he feels at home is a mythical one called Bab al-Shams (Gate of the Sun), in which he manages to hide.

Yunes is not only a father and husband but also a lover and freedom fighter -- a symbol of a whole community trying to resist the division imposed on it. But the more we read about him, the more he emerges as someone who no longer fits the present. Like Don Quixote, Yunes is an epic hero in an age in which epic heroes are embarrassing, their deaths a relief to them and to those who have to tell their stories.

In Khalil's telling, Yunes's death seems to mark the end of everything else. The novel begins by announcing that Umm Hassan, the only midwife in Shatila, has died; it ends with Khalil standing over his hero's grave. In between, other characters appear to tell the stories of their own demise; Galilee Hospital is closed down, the camp shrinks, and Khalil himself seems to have been hiding from revenge seekers.

But peace is not any nearer. After watching PLO Chairman Yasser Arafat and Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin shake hands in the famous 1993 White House ceremony, Khalil, unlike the people around him, finds it difficult to conceal his joy: He thinks he's witnessing the end to a long and muddy conflict. But the novel heralds no new beginning and very little hope, and the circular narrative out of which Khalil tries to find his way makes us feel that the characters' deaths will keep recurring. That's bad news for those of us still hoping to see peace prevail in the region, but good material for Khoury, whose bleak sense of history feeds this powerful novel. ·

Samir El-Youssef is a Palestinian novelist and co-author, with the Israeli writer Etgar Keret, of "Gaza Blues: Different Stories."