Beirut Nightmares [Paperback]

Ghada Samman (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: September 30, 2010

Beirut Nightmares is set at the height of the Lebanese Civil War. The narrator, trapped in her apartment for two weeks by street battles and sniper fire, writes a series of vignettes peopled by an extraordinary cast of characters, some drawn from shocking waking world and others living only in the sleeping minds, of those suffering in the conflict.


Named in the top-ten of The best 100 Arabic Books by the Arab Writers Union in 2010

Editorial Reviews

Language Notes

Text: English (translation)
Original Language: Arabic

About the Author

Ghada Samman was born and brought up in Damascus, Syria. She was educated at Damascus University, at the American University of Beirut and at London University. She began to write in the early 1960s and worked as a journalist and columnist in Beirut. She has written over thirty volumes of short stories, novels, poetry and non-fiction. She founded her own publishing house and lives at present in Paris.

Product Details

• Paperback: 378 pages
• Publisher: Quartet Books Ltd (September 30, 2010)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 070438065X
• ISBN-13: 978-0704380653
• Product Dimensions: 7.7 x 5 x 1 inches
• Shipping Weight: 9.6 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 5.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (3 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #684,717 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

More About the Author

Discover books, learn about writers, read author blogs, and more.

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

5 of 5 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Excellent Book, May 22, 2002

By 

"abuelruluf" (San Diego, CA USA) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Beirut Nightmares (Paperback)

Having myself lived through the war in Lebanon, Ghada Samman's autobiographical book brought back some painful memories. The book vividly recreates the desparation felt by normal people living in shelters and watching their world crumble around them in a senseless cycle of bombings, fighting and cruel murder.

The only optimistic and somewhat refreshing character in the book is the author herself. She never gives up on trying to leave the basement of her home located close to the demarcation line between East and West Beirut. However, as a reader who knows that the war brought only poverty and domination of Lebanon by Syria, I could only be disgusted by the uselesness of all the deaths and suffering. This led me to putting the book away several times only to pick it up again later and reading through the ugly war nightmares.

Finally, I am bemused that this leftist author seems convinced that the civil war was necessary in Lebanon. Civil-wars have no charm and no winner and the writers who instigate and wish for bloody "revolutions" are as guilty as the snipers who kill innocent civilians.

I highly recommend this book for its truthful recreation of the Beirut civil war experience.

5.0 out of 5 stars Nightmares of a Civil War, November 8, 2007

By 

Vittorio Caffè (Italy) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Beirut Nightmares (Paperback)

I have read many classics of war literature, but this was quite a surprise. Notwithstanding its being a translation form the Arabic, the richness of Samman's style and the power of her images manages to reach the reader, and give you that nightmarish feeling that she obviously meant to convey. The book is bleak, but powerful, and some pages have a terrible intensity. Sometime you just ask yourself what are the nightmares: what the narrating-I dreams in her restless nights, or the daily scenes of brutality and abomination?

One thing that struck me is that this book written by a Syrian woman who happened to live in Beirut during the devastating civil war of the late Seventies and early Eighties has many things in common with more famous books written by W.W.I veterans. The stench of corpses, the fear of snipers, the devastating experience of shelling; this is the trench warfare re-created in a modern urban environment. Once more, this proves that there is such a thing as a war literature, and that it has its own themes, images, atmospheres, produced by the supreme form of violence. But the fact that the narrator/protagonist is a woman adds a clear-headed but passionate point of view on the pointlessness and atrocity of warfare that you can't find in all W.W.I writers.

All in all, a book that doesn't absolutely deserve to be out of print, a literary gem that should be more famous than it is currently.

2 of 6 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars THE DESCREPANCE OF BEIRUT....., October 26, 2000

By 

nadia (LONDON,UK) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Beirut Nightmares (Paperback)

First of all...i would like to tell that all of her work is wonderful..it springs from her various truth emotions that makes any of her articles and novels different and distinguishing. this book is a realistic one...do you want to know why? cause she lived the disaster that happend in beirut -the civil war in the seventies-..you only feel that you are reading a novel by a person...but by time when it passes , you will definitely explore that it is a daiary..a daiary that is full of pain ,suffer,revultion from the war and silence,unjustly,envy,avid,hope,faith,different emotions ...they all gather together and make this wonderful book. it also contains these astonished comparisons and thoughts witch makes this book that talks about her life in an apartment next to the holiday-inn hotel...witch we can call the source of the war..you will find what is the difference between the ranks from all directions and sides.especially the pilitical and official...you will know and discover what's behind the bourgoise and poor people......you will know the right meaning of "revolution" and surviving.