"As a teller of tales and a spinner of stories, the Lebanese author Elias Khoury is on fire in his latest work of fiction, Broken Mirrors: Sinalcol. . . Though occasionally delirious, the patter of Khoury's tangential storytelling also feels well planned, as if he were quietly and deliberately building an argument about the capacity of art to beat back the sense that history is meaningless, repeating itself dumbly. . . The countervailing effect of Khoury's novel is to show how an entire world of literary forms—from pre-Islamic poetry to proverbs, oral storytelling traditions, and the tales within tales of A Thousand and One Nights—may be the more meaningful ancient phenomenon that returns, like overgrowth in a ruin, to heal and regenerate the culture of a badly damaged place. . . All those broken mirrors and fractured stories seem not chaotic or confusing but rather strangely hopeful, as if they could one day add up to a place where people who have hated and killed one another might find that they can live together, through a war, by folding it into the stories that came before and will continue to be told after." — Bookforum
"Within a finely rendered sociopolitical framework, Lebanese novelist Khoury (Gate of the Sum) dives down deeply to portray enduring personal pain." — Barbara Hoffert, Library Journal Reviews
"Broken Mirrors is a fascinating and trenchant literary exploration of a society at war with itself, but it is both more, and something other, than a war novel. It is an exploration of trauma, nostalgia, and the importance of the stories we tell." — Los Angeles Review of Books
"No Lebanese intellectual has been more vociferous than Khoury in asserting the claims of collective memory... His fiction has tackled large historical subjects with a consistently inventive approach to form. And his attention to the rhythms of the oral language has given a new flexibility to literary Arabic. Khoury has not abandoned the novel’s traditional strengths—vivid characters, wit, shrewd psychology—but his work is primarily concerned with the problems of recent Arab history, its ironic reversals and unrealized potential ...Broken Mirrors is a kaleidoscopic work, adopting different points of view to examine the same incidents, shuttling between past and present, mentioning people and events before the reader knows who or what they are... Khoury’s novels aim to instruct as well as to entertain: they are full of historical anecdotes, curious information, and intellectual gossip." — New York Review of Books
"[Khoury] is a writer of panoramic scope and ambition, and Broken Mirrors is rich with sly ironies, incisive political observations, and a cosmopolitan array of ideas and literary allusions." —Azadeh Moaveni, Financial Times
"By turns tender, cruel, violent, passionate, but at the same time profoundly literary." —L'Orient Littéraire (Lebanon)
"Khoury's capacious and entrancing novel, masterfully translated by the award-winning Humphrey Davies, is an extraordinary achievement." —The National (UAE)
"Khoury's narrative skills in this novel are at their peak: reading Shattered Mirror one has the impression of finding oneself in the eye of a whirlwind of a thousand tales, first glimpsed at, then shattered, then finally recovered." —Finzioni Magazine (Italy)
"In Sinalcol (Shattered Mirror), the great storyteller Elias Khoury recounts nearly fifty years of in Lebanese history in his usual eloquence" —Le Nouvel Observateur (France)
"This bounding novel by Elias Khoury is a powerful illustration of Lebanon, its history, and the intricate mosaic of religious communities and political factions that must coexist in this small country" —La Cause Littéraire (France)
★ 09/15/2015
Having fled war-torn Beirut for France 20 years before, Karim Shammas returns home, perhaps because he's homesick, perhaps to hunt his father's killer. Perhaps, too, he wants to find Sinalcol, his "spiritual twin," a shadowy figure whose nickname he's inherited. Yes, he's trying to see himself, but all the mirrors are broken. "The war will never end because it's inside us," says one character, and, indeed, war wreckage and culture clash here lie so close to personal wreckage and familial clash as to be indistinguishable. VERDICT Within a finely rendered sociopolitical framework, Lebanese novelist Khoury (Gate of the Sum) dives down deeply to portray enduring personal pain.
2015-10-15
A man returns to his native Lebanon—and a long history of personal and cultural turmoil—in this panoramic novel. Arguably Lebanon's leading literary figure (Yalo, 2008, etc.), Khoury centers this novel on Karim, a dermatologist who's been enmeshed in the nation's shifting fortunes throughout the second half of the 20th century. It's 1989, and he's been asked by his brother, Nasim, to help start a hospital in Beirut. Karim has lived in a self-imposed exile for years in France with his wife and children, and he's disinclined to go back, for reasons both political (a distaste for the extremist and sectarian rebels he'd interacted with) and personal (Nasim married his ex-girlfriend, for starters). Karim and Nasim have distinct personalities—upon his return, Karim muses on his various affairs, while Nasim recalls his ineptitude in various pursuits, from college to drug dealing. But Khoury plainly intends them to be archetypes of Lebanon's struggles to define itself after years (indeed, centuries) of religious sectarianism and civil war. Their father thinks of them as twins (though they were born just less than a year apart), and they serve as mirror images of each other, to pick a metaphor Khoury returns to often. The civil war, for instance, is "an assemblage of broken mirrors…images that reproduce each other but refuse to form a coherent whole." Khoury fragments the narrative in a similar fashion, sending Karim backward and forward in time to contemplate his childhood, his romantic relationships, religious leaders, and general sense of feeling trapped by the country's past. These shards of memory aren't a mess, exactly—Khoury's prose, via Davies' translation, is clean and plainspoken—but the time shifting and historical detail often leave the reader feeling whipsawed. (A helpful glossary of significant historical and cultural references is appended.) A lyrical, antic, sometimes-plodding embodiment of the complications of self and nationhood.
