Customer Reviews

Yalo (Rainmaker Translations)

5 star:		(1)
4 star:		(2)
3 star:		(2)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

Khoury's character, Yalo/Daniel in the novel Yalo is reminiscent of the young man, Meursault, in Camus' The Stranger. Is what Yalo telling us reality or his reality? What's real and what isn't? Yalo does not begin as a "crazed person" as described by one reviewer. He, like Meursault, is isolated and spiritually lost. A second reviewer claims Yalo is punished for crimes he had not committed "like planting bombs." Nowhere does Khoury state that Yalo committed this crime or did not commit this crime. Yalo's experience in the hands of his torturers/interrogators is terrifying - recall the horrors of Orwell's Room 101. His life story (before his descent into the world of rape, robbery, and bombs) is confusing and heartbreaking as are most people's lives. The novel Yalo is a challenge to read on many levels, but worth the effort.

A couple of years ago I picked up Elias Khoury's Gate of the Sun without knowing much about it, and was quickly engrossed in the incredibly inventive and compelling story of two generations of Palestinians in Lebanon. Where Gate of the Sun is an expansive work that stretches beyond the small confines of a refugee hospital in Beirut to take in villages and fields long out of reach, Yalo, Khoury's latest novel to be translated into English, in many ways contracts into the claustrophobic space of a dark prison basement.

Yalo is a former sectarian soldier arrested for theft, assault, and rape in the aftermath of Lebanon's brutal civil war. As torturers attack his body and mind to elicit a confession, he creates a series of new narratives, a stream of explanations that simultaneously reinforce and undermine each other by their very number. He justifies, he apologizes, he admits, he denies, and the picture we have of the events recounted becomes more and more distorted and fractured. Yet all this disorientation serves a purpose: the Guardian quotes Khoury as saying that when he started writing, he didn't know what "postmodern" was. "I was trying to express the fragmentation of society," Khoury said. "Beirut's past is not of stability, but of violent change. Everything is open, uncertain. In my fiction, you're not sure if things really happened, only that they're narrated. What's important is the story, not the history."
-From Guernica web magazine.

Like all of us, Yalo is a man with guilt over what he has done. Like many of us, he is also a man with reasons for what he has done. Like few of us, Yalo is a man who does not demand pity, who does not see himself as a victim. Instead, he turns a horrible situation into one fraught with questions: who is he? what is he? what was he? how did he change? how do the traditions of his family and people affect him?

Yalo makes me question the idea of free will in ways that I hadn't before.

This is not a book for the faint of heart: it is a brutal book, both physically and morally. Its questions are not easily answered.

This book is artistic in its beauty and descriptions. It is powerfully graphic in its depiction of the interrogators' torture and its impact on Yalo. Yet, the novel is extraordinarily difficult to read and follow as myths, recollections, truths and half-truths are interwoven as Yalo re-writes/re-tells his life and his crimes over and over under torture and the threat of more torture. Found many passages in this novel to be spectacular in their word crafting beauty. Yet, found a number of "side-pockets" to be challenging to stay engaged in the story line.

This book was different than what I thought it would be. I assumed I would learn something about living in Lebanon but there was little of that here. This book was disconnected, disturbing, rambling, repetitive - but that was the point and that's what made it a memorable read. The lead character, Yalo, has been tortured and has lost control of his memory and logic. Since the book is a first person recantation of his life, it's hard to follow, makes little sense at times, contradicts itself, rambles all over the place, and certain things get repeated and repeated. But again, that's the point of the book. Not an easy read because of the point of view (basically a crazed person). I plan to check out the author's other books to see his style of writing because this one was so unusual.