Everand Logo

Welcome to Everand!

  • Discover millions of ebooks, audiobooks, and so much more with a free trial

    Only $11.99/month after trial. Cancel anytime.

    Little Mountain
    Little Mountain
    Little Mountain
    Ebook222 pages3 hours

    Little Mountain

    By Elias Khoury and Edward W. Said

    4/5

    ()

    Read preview

    About this ebook

    Written in the opening phases of the Lebanese Civil War (1975--1990), Little Mountain is told from the perspectives of three characters: a Joint Forces fighter; a distressed civil servant; and an amorphous figure, part fighter, part intellectual. Elias Khoury's language is poetic and piercing as he tells the story of Beirut, civil war, and fractured identity.

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherMacmillan Publishers
    Release dateNov 27, 2007
    ISBN9781429916943
    Little Mountain
    Author

    Elias Khoury

    Elias Khoury is the author of eleven novels including The Journey of Little Gandhi, The Kingdom of Strangers, and Yalo. He is a professor of Middle Eastern and Islamic studies at New York University, and editor in chief of the literary supplement of Beirut’s daily newspaper, An-Nahar.

    Related to Little Mountain

    Related ebooks

    Literary Fiction For You

    View More
    View More

    Related podcast episodes

    Related articles

    • Article

      A Year in Reading: Hisham Matar

      Dec 18, 2018

      The fact that this isn’t recognized for what it is, a magisterial work and a 20th-century masterpiece, makes me even more anxious about our times. The post A Year in Reading: Hisham Matar appeared first on The Millions.

      3 min read

    • Article

      Spotlight Raja Shehadeh

      Aug 21, 2019

      Spotlight Raja Shehadeh
      3 min read

    • Article

      Poetry and Intrigue in Uzbekistan: On Hamid Ismailov’s ‘The Devil’s Dance’

      Aug 8, 2018

      In Hamid Ismailov’s book The Devil’s Dance, one Uzbek prisoner says to another, “It’s time for afternoon prayers, I think. Are you a believer, or one of the moderns?”—a familiar and false dichotomy that intellectuals in Muslim countries have had to c

      6 min read

    • Article

      The Blood of Two Languages

      Dec 2, 2022

      The Blood of Two Languages
      14 min read

    • Article

      The Nobel Prize Winner You’ve Never Heard Of

      Apr 6, 2018

      Agnon dedicated the last two decades of his life to writing about his hometown as a symbol of the world of eastern European Jewry destroyed in the Holocaust. Asked by a literary critic what he was trying to accomplish, he answered simply: “I am build

      4 min read

    • Article

      For The Love Of Language

      Oct 7, 2023

      For The Love Of Language
      2 min read

    • Article

      Speaking In Tongues

      Mar 15, 2019

      In the midst of our brutality and our venality, the mere mention of Urdu symbolises a dream of cosmopolitan elegance, of romance and of eloquence. It is also a fact that, for some people, Urdu also symbolises an alien presence, a mark of invasion, of

      2 min read

    • Article

      A Horseman for the Headless: On Ismail Kadare’s ‘The Traitor’s Niche’

      Dec 28, 2018

      Kadare’s fiction intuits the spirt of the art movements of his day, orbiting the dark ambiance of indie cinema, goth punk, shock installation. The post A Horseman for the Headless: On Ismail Kadare’s ‘The Traitor’s Niche’ appeared first on The Millio

      9 min read

    • Article

      Lost In Translation

      Jun 29, 2023

      IT IS NOT UNTIL LITERALLY the last page of the book, first published in 2011, that the author concedes that the Roma originally entered Europe 600 years ago “under false names, concealing their origins and telling tales about why they had to leave th

      3 min read

    • Article

      Dissident Lit

      Sep 1, 2022

      My sophomore year in college, I took a class on the Russian novel. I remember our goodlooking young professor striding across campus in a long black coat, heads turning in his wake. It was said he looked like Lenin. His eyes burned like coals, his ch

      9 min read

    • Article

      A Highly Refined Hick

      Jun 1, 2020

      A Highly Refined Hick
      2 min read

    Related categories

    Reviews for Little Mountain

    4/5

    11 ratings2 reviews

    What did you think?

    Tap to rate

    Review must be at least 10 words

    • 3/5
      This poetic novel is set in a neighborhood in Beirut during the Lebanese civil war, and is narrated by three men: an Arabic soldier in the Lebanese National Movement; a government employee caught in the middle of the crisis; and an intelligent and idealistic young man who is also participating in the conflict. I found the narrative difficult to follow, as it was often surrealistic and at times overly repetitive, and I skimmed the last half of the book.
    • 4/5
      This book takes place mainly in Beirut, during the Lebanese Civil War in the 1970’s. It does not have a typical “plot”, but rather it describes a series of incidents involving the narrator. These include some memories of his youth, before the war, some of his experiences during the war, both as a soldier and a civilian, and an encounter with an old acquaintance later on (I think), in Paris.The main interest and real power of the book, though, comes from the style rather than from the content alone. The style changes in response to the situation the narrator is in, internally as well as external. So, in the earliest section, describing his youth and the area of Beirut he lived in, the descriptions are coherent. This is followed by repeated and slightly varying descriptions of soldiers searching his house looking for him after he had already, the reader infers, left to join a rebel group. The next section describes scenes from the war itself – running through streets, firing and being fired at, hiding in a church, comrades being injured and killed. This section is more chaotic, reflecting the chaos of war and also his confused and stressed thinking, and the remaining sections get more and more disjointed, with seemingly random thoughts, memories, hallucinations mixed together with straightforward descriptions. But nothing in his world is straightforward anymore, and the book reflects that. Whenever the narrator tries to do something “normal” – go out to find bread, or water, or drive some friends home from a café, or park his car, or talk about the war with his friend in Paris, images and memories intervene, distorting the narrative and distancing the reader from events just as the narrator’s mind is distanced. I sometimes found it too surreal, and had difficulty understanding the allusions, but sometimes the style worked wonderfully to portray the sense of confusion and dislocation. One particularly strong short section describes the terror of walking with his wife and four small children down the four or five flights of stairs from his apartment to a shelter in the basement, in pitch dark, with shells exploding around them. Another conveys through a series of conversations and descriptions his incomprehension when his car, parked outside his house, is destroyed in the fighting – he just can’t believe no one will fix it, or pay for it, or even consider it an important event. My knowledge of the politics of Lebanon in the ‘70’s, and of Lebanese culture in general, is very limited, so I am undoubtedly missing a lot of references that more knowledgeable readers will pick up. On the simpler level of describing how it feels to live in the middle of chaos, as an active participant or a bystander, I really did get it. The writing shows you the disintegration rather than just telling you it happened, and this is a great achievement. Highly recommended.

    Book preview

    Little Mountain - Elias Khoury

    Enjoying the preview?
    Page 1 of 1