Gates of the City — Elias Khoury

Elias Khoury is one of the most distinguished writers and intellectuals in the contemporary Arab world. His contributions to Arab culture are substantial and enormously diverse, including novels, literary criticism, and cultural critique. His distinction as a writer and critic in the Arab world, already recognized in France where many of his works have been published in French translation, is currently finding recognition in the United States as well.
Gates of the City, Khoury's first novel, mixes the genres of the epic and the lyric to meditate on the pains and ravages of civil war. Khoury also provocatively draws on the traditions and themes of Arabic storytelling as articulated in A Thousand and One Nights.
A man wanders the labyrinths of the city of Beirut (unidentified in the novel) out of the past and through the present into an uncertain future, a trajectory much like the city itself, the space of contested cultural claims as yet unresolved. The man must find his way through the city's passages, out of his own past, through the present, and into a still anticipated future.