Lebanon: As Though She Were Sleeping, by Elias Khoury

I'm having a hard time with books from the Middle East. I really enjoyed my selection from the United Arab Emirates - That Other Me, by Maha Gargarsh. Other than that though, I've found Middle Eastern literature very hard to get into. So it was with my selection for Lebanon, which, according to the cover, won the inaugural Arabic Novel Prize. The language is beautiful and poetic. But the story is very non-linear. Ostensibly, the action takes place over three separate nights (some months apart) - in fact, the three sections are titled "The First Night", "The Second Night" and "The Third Night". However, it is a lot more wide ranging than that, and tracks back and forth in time, in a way that is not easy to follow. I found it difficult when putting the book down and coming back to it, to remember where the story had got to.

Meelya is a young Lebanese Christian woman who has married Mansour, a Palestinian. She leaves Lebanon to live with him in Nazareth, but escapes reality in dreams. Her dream world is convincingly evoked, as she slips in and out of it. But just as in real life dreams, the book can be rambling and illogical at times. Still, the beauty of the language made me persist. Eventually, at the end of the story, there was a moment of revelation as the author linked the story of Abraham's intended sacrifice of his son Isaac with the death of Christ(and with Meelya herself) that formed a very satisfying conclusion (a little Bible knowledge will help the reader here).

As Though She Were Sleeping was translated from Arabic by Humphrey Davies and published in Great Britain by MacLehose Press in 2011.