Yalo

Yalo

Elias Khoury

Yalo was a soldier on one of the many sides in Lebanon’s sectarian civil war, and then he becomes a deserter and a thief, a nightwatchman in Paris, an arms smuggler, and then a rapist. And then he falls in love with his victim – who turns him in to the police. This novel is a modern Thousand and One Nights, a series of confessions extracted under torture, a recitation of all of his memories, all of his sorrows, all of his guilt – and other crimes which his interrogators need him to confess to. Beirut and the legacy of the wars of the Middle East are the texture of Elias Khoury’s extraordinary and huge literary achievement.