White Masks

It's quite obvious that many prize winning authors have read Khoury. Enjoy!

Throughout the book, the author tends to ramble and digress, making it a difficult and incoherent book to read. But just when you think you're lost, a pice of e puzzle comes into play. In any case, it gives a great depiction of day-to-day lives in a war torn country.

A novel of the Civil War in Lebanon which has been more-or-less on-going since 1958. This is a work about the impact of the war on common urban folks. How a father, mother and sister go crazy after the loss of their son and brother. The author focuses the story around a common-place killing. The father, whose son was killed in the fighting some years ago, basically goes bonkers and wanders around town putting up posters memorializing his son as a martyr, but later, removing them. The father ends up killed with evidence of torture, his body abandoned in a trash heap. Such a murder is of absolutely no interest to anyone except his family and that is why the author choose this incident as the focus of his work. This book is a “war story” but it’s not about battles – it’s about the psychological impact of war on people, such as the behavior of the father and a daughter who starts acting like a dog. But life goes on. We learn a lot about Lebanon and Beirut in the book; the diversity of the country – Armenians, Palestinians, Druze, Kurds and Christians. We learn about the callous treatment of women, looting and profiteering.

This strange novel about the search for clues to the murder of the father of a "martyr" in the first years of Lebanese Civil War puzzled me often, but I kept reading, impressed by Elias Khoury's gifted depiction of Beirut, where I lived at that time. He captures the chaos, the resilience of the Beirutis and the weirdness of the war. The novel takes some effort to read and lacks suspense, but never mind, that's a trivial price to pay for such sustained brilliance and originality of expression.

Presentation quite challenging to explore.