Beirut 75

Description

“Whenever my father fails to hunt and returns defeated from the sea, he goes hunting for the golden bird in my mother’s gardens… The result is a new mouth to feed, and a new child’s body thrown into our cramped room… He vents his fury in bed, and I devour myself. I can’t even speak to the girl I love… Oppression is everywhere. All I can do in this suffocating atmosphere is write her love letters and drop them at her doorstep when she returns from school, and like spies, we exchange letters… I dream of her on my solitary journeys to the forbidden apple orchards, and I dream of her, defeated and a burden, weaving her between my fingers… And my father returns from his journey defeated, with a new child on his shoulder… The narrative event in ‘Beirut 75’ is a collection of intersecting actions whose scenes overlap. It is an ordinary and simple event, yet the novel’s greatness is revealed in the blending of reality with judgment, the rational with the irrational, coincidence with intention, and life with death… in a feverish dialectic, in a paradox that overturns logic.” Consciousness, where the living are dead and the dead are alive, and where, in a twist of absurdity, madness becomes reason and reason madness.