Little Mountain

by Elias Khoury, Edward W. Said, Edward W. Said (Foreword by), Maia Tabet (Translator)

Overview

Written in the opening phases of the Lebanese Civil War (1975—1990), Little Mountain is told from the perspectives of three characters: a Joint Forces fighter; a distressed civil servant; and an amorphous figure, part fighter, part intellectual. Elias Khoury's language is poetic and piercing as he tells the story of Beirut, civil war, and fractured identity.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780312427160
Publisher:	Picador
Publication date:	11/27/2007
Edition description:	First Edition
Pages:	168
Product dimensions:	8.02(w) x 11.02(h) x 0.47(d)

About the Author

Elias Khoury is the author of eleven novels including The Journey of Little Gandhi, The Kingdom of Strangers, and Yalo. He is a professor of Middle Eastern and Islamic studies at New York University, and editor in chief of the literary supplement of Beirut's daily newspaper, An-Nahar.

Editorial Reviews

Khoury's picaresque ramblings through the Lebanese landscapes offered by civil combat reveal areas of uncertainty and perturbation unthought of before.” —Edward W. Said, from the Foreword

“Without a doubt the finest novel on Lebanon's [civil] war.” —Le Nouvel Observateur

“Little Mountain is above all a poem. . . . Elias Khoury, like all true poets, is also a seer. Nothing tepid about these cruel pages. A lucidity equal to Rimbaud's.” —Le Monde

“Under the corrosive, passionate pen of Elias Khoury, the city at war, [Beirut,] re-created. A group of young men-at-arms—the Fedayin—kill and die between the sea and the mountain, between the asphalt and the sky, love spiked with murder and the blood of death mixed indiscriminately with the blood of life.” —Le Monde diplomatique

“A magnificent, allusive writing that captures the daily insanity of human beings. In this plaintive, yearning prose-poem of a novel, [Khoury] intones the slain memory of a ravaged city, reconciling itself to destructive madness, yet fiercely clinging to life.” —'Est Républicain

From the Publisher

This first English translation of a contemporary Lebanese writer's adumbrated vision of violent political strife and urgent nationalism makes for intriguing, highly rigorous, if not ultimately satisfying, reading. Horrors are intoned in a lyrical, repetitious chant; point of view is transient; events are ambiguous and distorted. Self-consciously formless, irreverent, ironic, disoriented and existential, the novel is a singular blueprint of a fractured, cursed homeland and Khoury's own picaresque life. Variously a novelist, journalist, translator, literary critic and book editor, Khoury recounts here his early years in the ``Little Mountain,'' or Christian East Beirut, and expulsion precipitated by his collaboration with Muslim and Palestinian nationalists; his military engagements in downtown Beirut and the eastern mountains of Lebanon during 1975, the first year of the civil war; loves (the revolutionary refers to women misogynistically) and losses; and exile in Paris. Suffused with political polemics and rhetoric, a foreword by Columbia University English professor Said places the postmodern Little Mountain in the context of the Arabic novel. (June)

Publishers Weekly - Publisher's Weekly