Khoury Elias Скачать все книги 2 Количество книг

"Los Angeles has Joan Didion and Raymond Chandler, and Istanbul, Orhan Pamuk. The beautiful, resilient city of Beirut belongs to Khoury."-Laila Lalami,

From the author of and "one of the most innovative novelists in the Arab World" () comes the many-layered story of Little Gandhi, or Abd Al-Karim, a shoe shine in a city fractured by war. Shot down in the street, Gandhi's story is recounted by an aging and garrulous prostitute named Alice.

Ingeniously embedding stories within stories, becomes the story of a city, Beirut, in the grip of civil war. Once again, as John Leonard wrote in , Elias Khoury "fills in the blank spaces on the Middle Eastern map in our Western heads."

Karim Chammas returns to Lebanon, his family, and his past after ten years of establishing a new life in France. Back in Beirut, Karim reacquaints himself with his brother Nassim, now married to his former love Hind, and old friends from the leftist political circles within which he once roamed under the nom de guerre Sinalcol. By the end of his six-month stay, he has been reintroduced to the chaos of cultural, religious and political battles that continue to rage in Lebanon. Overwhelmed by the experiences of his return, Karim is forced to contemplate his identity and his place in Lebanon's history. The story of Karim and his family is born of other stories that intertwine to form an imposing fresco of Lebanese society over the past fifty years. examines the roots of an endemic civil war and a country's unsettled past.