Gate of the Sun [Paperback]

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.

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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 buffalo. I'm certain his cousin stole them. Took them and disappeared. The man must have waited a month at the border, then despaired and had no choice but to make up the story of the buffalo massacre. Everything foolish we do, we blame on the Jews."

Interspersed with Khalil's stories is his one-sided conversation with Yunes, which gradually reveals the history of a friendship where nothing is withheld. The two men "discuss" everything and nothing, but always they return, with respect and wonder, to the women in their lives. Early on, Khalil recalls that the novelist Kanafani interviewed Yunes but decided not to write about him because "he was looking for mythic stories, and yours was just the story of a man in love. Where would be the symbolism in this love that had no place to root itself? How did you expect he would believe the story of your love for your wife? Is a man's love for his wife really worth writing about?"

This love roots itself in Bab al-Shams, the cave where Yunes and his wife, Nahilah, met secretly over the decades of their marriage. Bab al-Shams (Arabic for "gate of the sun") is where they made love, shared meals and discussed their children. It is also the scene of Nahilah's loving exposure of Yunes's self-delusion, an inspired monologue that chastens and enlightens him. The cave is the novel. At one point, Khalil explains this to Yunes: "We've made a shelter out of words, a country out of words, and women out of words."

All of which is not to say that historical events are absent from Khoury's fiction. But he confines them to the conversation between Khalil and Yunes. Speaking about the Holocaust, Khalil tells his friend: "You and I and every human being on the face of the planet should have known and not stood by in silence, should have prevented that beast from destroying its victims in that barbaric, unprecedented manner. Not because the victims were Jews but because their death meant the death of humanity within us."

On the murder of Israeli athletes at the Munich Olympics, Khalil tells Yunes: "I know what you think of that kind of operation, and I know you were one of the few who dared take a stand against the hijacking of airplanes, the operations abroad and the killing of civilians."

On Palestinian identity before 1948, Khalil admits to Yunes: "Palestine was the cities - Haifa, Jaffa, Jerusalem and Acre. In them we could feel something called Palestine. The villages were like all villages. . . . The truth is that those who occupied Palestine made us discover the country as we were losing it."

Asking why the Palestinians fled their land, Khalil demands: "Tell me about that blackness. I don't want the usual song about the betrayal by the Arab armies in the '48 war - I've had enough of armies. What did you do? Why are you here and they're there?"

There has been powerful fiction about Palestinians and by Palestinians, but few have held to the light the myths, tales and rumors of both Israel and the Arabs with such discerning compassion. In Humphrey Davies's sparely poetic translation, "Gate of the Sun" is an imposingly rich and realistic novel, a genuine masterwork.

Elias Khoury weaves a multitude of stories of people, some good, some less so, all flawed in their various ways, into a narrative that makes up the story of a people. One can recognize and identify with the human condition and struggles of each of those individuals, and yet through Khoury's eyes one can also see the whole of the society as it suffers the destruction from being uprooted and exiled by outside forces.

Not just about Palestinians - but about humanity everywhere.

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 after years returns to her village of Al-Kweikat to find her house untouched and occupied by a Lebanese Jewish woman, who is herself heartbroken in longing for her country Lebanon and the tragic everyday story of the shampoo seller and con man Salim Assad,stories ranging from pre-Israeli Palestine and the catastrophe and chaos that was the Palestinian Nakba up to the Lebanese civil war and Israeli invasion of Lebanon and its horrifying aftermath,is the story of Yunes and Nahilah, his beautiful and long suffering wife and their secret meetings in the caves of Bab al Shams in Galilee. They can only be man and wife in this cave, in those rare moments of love and passion, both divided by circumstances they can not control. Yunes is a fedayee in Lebanon and can only pass into Galilee by secret. He is not there to support his wife, raise his children, be a father and he is absent when his first born Ibrahim dies tragically. Yet Khalil is uncertain about many aspects of his friend's life, he can not understand why Yunes never tried to give up the life of a fighter and be a husband to Nahilah and father to his children, nor is he certain about the circumstances of Ibrahims death. "Tell me, Yunes, why didn't you go back for good? Why didn't you ever try? Were you afraid of dying? If you say you were afraid they would liquidate you, Ill understand, but then don't talk to me about the struggle or the revolution or any of that." Khalil is even uncertain where the love story of ever patient Nahilah and Yunes ends. Was is it on that fateful night under the Roman olive tree when Nahilah opened herself to Yunes, revealing the full extent of her sacrifice to him and telling him she could not bear this life any longer, or was it in 1982 when all passing into Galilee became impossible because of the Israeli invasion of South Lebanon? There are no answers to all these questions. It is their memory that Khalil wants to keep alive, the memory of ordinary men and the memory of extraordinary women, in a world of confusion and happiness that can not be."I didn't weep for Shams as I have wept for you and for this woman.I didn't weep for my father as I have wept for you and for her.I didn't weep for my mother as I have wept for you and for her,Khalil tells Yunes at the end of their path together, realizing that in this human tragedy the conclusion of every story can only be heartbreak.

The entire novel is told without chronology and jumps from event to event, often without giving dates and detailing the political happenings mentioned,such as the many sieges of the Shatila camp,the pre-1967 history and subsequent occupation of Gaza and the West Bank.Readers of this beautiful epic need atleast a rudimentary knowledge of the conflict and its historical outline, in order not to get lost and fully immerse themselves in the stories,events and people presented in Bab al Shams. Nonetheless,the scope, brilliance and humanity of Elias Khourys acclaimed epic is almost beyond words.It is a story,or hundredths of them, ripped straight out life. There are no villains, only human beings. There are heroes, yet they are almost too quiet to be heard. The prove that Elias Khourys novel is fully set in the world we inhabit, is that we are ultimately left without answers, wishing with all of our hearts that things could have been different for Yunes and Nahilah, for the abused Shams and the gentle Dr.Khalil,including the mother and father he barely knew. We, like Dr.Khalil, and all human beings must never stop searching. It is the ultimate goal and drive of our humanity. We must never stop asking and never stop admiring, despite all weakness we might encounter. The truth is not always in need of a definite answer. The story never ends and should never end, as we learn in this magnificent book.

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