If you open a North American lit mag at random, there's an approximately 97% chance the first story you land on will include a scene of someone doing some sort of prosaic domestic activity like making coffee. This is how we signal Serious Realistic Writing in our literary culture. This long prose-poem (it's really more that than a novel) begins with its narrator making coffee, but with a difference:

How can I diffuse the aroma of coffee into my cells, while shells from the sea rain down on the sea-facing kitchen, spreading the stink of gunpowder and the taste of nothingness? One second. ... One second is not long enough to open the water bottle or pour the water into the coffee pot. One second is not long enough to light a match. But one second is long enough for me to burn.

The narrator is living a single day--not coincidentally, the anniversary of the Hiroshima bombing--in Beirut during its 1982 siege by Israel. The way that ordinary individual life intersects with the geopolitical scale of warfare and the constant threat of instant death (instant at best) gives the writing a particular torque or madness that I haven't seen in any other book. Formulas about the best literature being "non-political" obviously don't apply here: this is an ordinary life saturated with the possibility of violence, its temporality flowing into the trans-individual temporality of history.

Following the proscriptions of modernism, the writing is very often allusive and cryptic and sprawling. And I've mentioned this is really more of a prose poem than a novel, so it wears its day-in-the-life conceit pretty loosely. You have long more-poetic passages, discourses on factional political disputes, and remembrances, like one of love affair with an Israeli woman (it will surprise you how horny this part is). At least for me, there are few specific set-pieces that I remember well, but the book as an evocative crystallization of traumatic memory has stayed with me.

Memory for Forgetfulness

Loading Description

Bookshelves

Threads

Quotes

Reviews

Lists

Purchasable Editions

Memory for Forgetfulness (1995)

Memory for Forgetfulness (1995)

You May Also Like