Limbo Beirut
-
- $19.99
-
- $19.99
Publisher Description
In Hilal Chouman’s Limbo Beirut, a gay artist, a struggling novelist, a pregnant woman, a disabled engineering student, a former militia member, and a medical intern all take turns narrating the violent events of May 2008, when Hezbollah militants and Sunni fighters clashed in the streets of Beirut. For most of these young men and women, the Lebanese Civil War (1975–1990) is but a vague recollection, but the brutality of May 2008 serves to reawaken forgotten memories and stir up fears of a revival of sectarian violence. Yet despite these fears, the violence these characters witness helps them to break free from the mundane details of their lives and look at the world anew.
The multiple narrative voices and the dozens of pen-and-ink illustrations that accompany the text allow Chouman to achieve a mesmerizing cinematic quality with this novel that is unique in modern Arabic fiction. Not only will readers appreciate the meaningful exploration of the effects of violence on the psyche, but they will also enjoy discovering how the lives of these characters—almost all of whom are strangers to one another—intersect in surprising ways.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Chouman's carefully constructed novel, the first of his works to be translated into English, tracks the confluence of a handful of emotional and anxious Beirutis amid the violent clashes that rattled the city in 2008. Unable to sleep, an artist leaves his dreaming lover to graffiti faces "without chins or mouths." He is joined on the street by a medical intern who was recently dumped by his fianc e. An ersatz militiaman attempts to confront the duo, but is struck dead by a car before he can act. The culprit is a would-be writer, desperate after his Japanese wife abandons him for home. "Do I have a story?" he muses, "and how can someone who doesn't have at minimum even one story write a novel?" The five narratives don't exactly fit together, and the best way to read the book is as five distinct stories. The doctor wonders how he became "suddenly a witness to the lives of all these people" and the broader effort to conflate connection (however fleeting) with profundity strikes a false note. Still, Chouman is a sharp, insightful writer ("Beirut is a deep valley... wholly below us, wholly remote") deftly tracking his artist, who wanders without a definite plan, stopping only to notice the "rays of light" that are "increasing and widening shyly."
