Language and time confound a prisoner's memory

By Elias Khoury

Translated from the Arabic

by Peter Theroux

Archipelago. 270 pp. $25

Reviewed by John Freeman

What is more damaging to a storyteller's accuracy - time or torture?

Here is the heart of Elias Khoury's mesmerizing new novel,

Yalo

, in which a young man is arrested at the end of the Lebanese civil war and charged with rape, robbery and collaboration. These charges against Yalo are serious in a country seeking to avenge its onetime avengers.

If Yalo cannot get his story straight, he faces life in prison or worse.

Parsing his tale is not going to be an easy task, for Khoury's troubled, shell-shocked ex-soldier is a man caught between worlds and languages. He also inherits a legacy of forgetting. Yalo's Kurdish grandfather grew up in Syria, speaking the dead Aramaic language of Syriac, but emigrated to Lebanon and became a Christian priest. Yalo's mother was abandoned by his father and spent her life obsessed with a lover who refused to divorce his wife.

This tortured family history emerges to the readers through flashbacks that spring open like escape hatches during Yalo's interrogation. In the book's opening scene, Yalo sits before two court officers and Shirin, the woman he allegedly raped. As he is taunted and threatened, Yalo withdraws into his mind, where he recalls rapping his Kalashnikov on the window of the car Shirin had parked in with a man who was not her fiance. What happens afterward is to Yalo an act of love; in legal terms, it is rape.

Or was it? Asking the reader to sympathize with a rapist is probably as bold a gambit as Nabokov's Humbert Humbert in

Lolita

, but Khoury goes at it in an entirely different fashion. As he did in

Gate of the Sun

, his powerful epic of the Palestinian diaspora, Khoury piles one story upon the next upon the next, building a penumbra of tales that cloud a reader's perception of what is real and what is imagined, what is told to family members orally and what has actually happened.

At the same time, Yalo's life expands concentrically before our eyes.

We learn how he left school to fight in the war, lost friends, was abandoned in Paris, and then was rescued by a rich arms dealer. As the interrogation heats up, we hear the story of his robbing and raping over and over, and with each telling Yalo's own faith in his confession erodes. "They asked you things you had already confessed to," he thinks, "and when you repeated your confessions you made mistakes, which was an unavoidable thing because you cannot tell the same story twice."

To untangle his tale, a reader must follow Yalo into a vortex of memory and self-deceit, which Khoury beautifully portrays. The road is paved with metaphors that cluster and burst only to be replaced and then conflated with one another: Yalo thinks of himself as a hawk, he refers to his stomach as a graveyard, his mouth a tomb.

Occasionally this style can feel too hotly exuberant, a stew of themes, but when you put the book down or take a break from it, the effect proves purposeful. The cultural guilt from which Yalo proceeds - his grandfather's trinity of betrayals of his original culture, religion and language - melds with Yalo's interrogation torture. In his mind, Yalo is not being punished just for what he did, but for whom and what he is or isn't.

However you feel about crime and punishment,

Yalo

will make for difficult reading. In one horrific scene, Yalo is stripped, dropped into a sack with a wild animal, and then beaten. In another awful scene, he is forced to sit on a broken bottle and write his confession out by hand.

One of the weaknesses of this novel, however, is that while Khoury portrays Yalo's torture in realistic terms, he does not step outside his head to portray his crimes. We are therefore trapped inside Yalo's history and his mind. Perhaps that is where Khoury wants us to be - suffocated by the past, swirling around in a sea of recrimination and rationalization, cut off from Yalo's effect on others. It is through such a blinkered perspective that war crimes are committed.