Milton Public Library

Yalo, Elias Khoury

eng

technical information on music

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fiction

Yalo

electronic resource

Elias Khoury

Elias Khoury's novel propels Yalo us into a fantastic universe of skewed reality that leaves us breathless to the last sentence. We follow the path of a young man, Yalo, who is growing up like a stray dog on the streets of Beirut during the long years of the Lebanese civil war. Living with his mother, who "lost her face in the mirror," he falls in with a dangerous gang whose violent escapades he treats as a game. The game becomes a frightening reality, however, when Yalo is accused of rape and imprisoned. He is forced to confess to crimes of which he has no recollection. As he writes, and rewrites, he begins to grasp his family's past and recall all that his psyche has buried, and the true Yalo begins to emerge. "How to write Beirut?...With words and images that stumble with weariness, that collapse from the heat, from the stone which composes them only to crumble in turn?...This is why Khoury's fiction is so powerful. The intent of the writing is to restore {Beirut's} soul." "Elias Khoury's Yalo is a novel that transcends-as only art can-the deep divisiveness of ideology, both political and religious. Yalo speaks to our universal humanity, to our profound longing for a realization of self, and for a connection to others." "Khoury refuses to give the reader an easy position from which to judge Yalo-either as a poor soul or a serial rapist, criminal or victim of torture-or from which to judge Lebanon's tragic and violent fate. His novel is a dense and stunning work of art." "A heartbreaking book and sometimes hypnotic in its beauty...With both gentle and cruel images, Khoury wrote a lamentation for the generation that was corrupted and lost its children, and for the children themselves."

adult

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