- Paperback: 320 pages
- Publisher: Quercus; UK airports edition (4 Jun 2009)
- Language English
- ISBN-10: 1847243916
- ISBN-13: 978-1847243911
- Product Dimensions: 23 x 15.2 x 2 cm
- Amazon Bestsellers Rank: 3,526,477 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
Yalo
and over one million other books are available for Amazon Kindle .
Learn more
| ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
Did you know you can trade in your old books for an Amazon.co.uk Gift Card to spend on the things you want? Plus, get an extra £5 Gift Certificate when you trade in books worth £10 or more before June 30, 2012. Visit the Books Trade-In Store for more details. |
Product details |
More About the Author
Product Description
Review
'A curiously mesmerizing novel … an ambitious piece of work … It would be hard to think of a more worthwhile endeavour for fiction to embark on' James Lasdun, Guardian.
'A dizzying journey into the extremes of human experience - into intense sensuality and stomach-turning violence' Adam Lebor, New York Times.
'A highly compelling performance, presented in beautifully crafted, often lilting prose... This novel is about a corrupted individual in a corrupting time, but it speaks of and to us all' Guy Mannes-Abbott, Independent.
'Los Angeles has Joan Didion and Raymond Chandler, and Istanbul, Orhan Pamuk. The beautiful, resilient city of Beirut belongs to Khoury' Laila Lalami, Los Angeles Times.
'A compelling, relentlessly immediate tale' Daniel Hahn, Independent on Sunday. --This text refers to an alternate Paperback edition.
'A dizzying journey into the extremes of human experience - into intense sensuality and stomach-turning violence' Adam Lebor, New York Times.
'A highly compelling performance, presented in beautifully crafted, often lilting prose... This novel is about a corrupted individual in a corrupting time, but it speaks of and to us all' Guy Mannes-Abbott, Independent.
'Los Angeles has Joan Didion and Raymond Chandler, and Istanbul, Orhan Pamuk. The beautiful, resilient city of Beirut belongs to Khoury' Laila Lalami, Los Angeles Times.
'A compelling, relentlessly immediate tale' Daniel Hahn, Independent on Sunday. --This text refers to an alternate Paperback edition.
Product Description
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.
Inside This Book
(Learn More)
Browse and search another edition of this book.
Browse and search another edition of this book.
Tag this product(What's this?)Think of a tag as a keyword or label you consider is strongly related to this product.
Tags will help all customers organise and find favourite items. |
What Other Items Do Customers Buy After Viewing This Item?
Customer Reviews
There are no customer reviews yet on Amazon.co.uk.
5 star
4 star
3 star
2 star
1 star
Most Helpful Customer Reviews on Amazon.com (beta)
Amazon.com:
5 reviews
2 of 2 people found the following review helpful
Reminiscent of Camus
21 April 2008
Format:Hardcover
Khoury's character, Yalo/Daniel in the novel Yalo is reminiscent of the young man, Meursault, in Camus' The Stranger. Is what Yalo telling us reality or his reality? What's real and what isn't? Yalo does not begin as a "crazed person" as described by one reviewer. He, like Meursault, is isolated and spiritually lost. A second reviewer claims Yalo is punished for crimes he had not committed "like planting bombs." Nowhere does Khoury state that Yalo committed this crime or did not commit this crime. Yalo's experience in the hands of his torturers/interrogators is terrifying - recall the horrors of Orwell's Room 101. His life story (before his descent into the world of rape, robbery, and bombs) is confusing and heartbreaking as are most people's lives. The novel Yalo is a challenge to read on many levels, but worth the effort.
1 of 1 people found the following review helpful
The story, not the history
1 Aug 2009
Format:Paperback
A couple of years ago I picked up Elias Khoury's Gate of the Sun without knowing much about it, and was quickly engrossed in the incredibly inventive and compelling story of two generations of Palestinians in Lebanon. Where Gate of the Sun is an expansive work that stretches beyond the small confines of a refugee hospital in Beirut to take in villages and fields long out of reach, Yalo, Khoury's latest novel to be translated into English, in many ways contracts into the claustrophobic space of a dark prison basement.
Yalo is a former sectarian soldier arrested for theft, assault, and rape in the aftermath of Lebanon's brutal civil war. As torturers attack his body and mind to elicit a confession, he creates a series of new narratives, a stream of explanations that simultaneously reinforce and undermine each other by their very number. He justifies, he apologizes, he admits, he denies, and the picture we have of the events recounted becomes more and more distorted and fractured. Yet all this disorientation serves a purpose: the Guardian quotes Khoury as saying that when he started writing, he didn't know what "postmodern" was. "I was trying to express the fragmentation of society," Khoury said. "Beirut's past is not of stability, but of violent change. Everything is open, uncertain. In my fiction, you're not sure if things really happened, only that they're narrated. What's important is the story, not the history."
-From Guernica web magazine.
Yalo is a former sectarian soldier arrested for theft, assault, and rape in the aftermath of Lebanon's brutal civil war. As torturers attack his body and mind to elicit a confession, he creates a series of new narratives, a stream of explanations that simultaneously reinforce and undermine each other by their very number. He justifies, he apologizes, he admits, he denies, and the picture we have of the events recounted becomes more and more distorted and fractured. Yet all this disorientation serves a purpose: the Guardian quotes Khoury as saying that when he started writing, he didn't know what "postmodern" was. "I was trying to express the fragmentation of society," Khoury said. "Beirut's past is not of stability, but of violent change. Everything is open, uncertain. In my fiction, you're not sure if things really happened, only that they're narrated. What's important is the story, not the history."
-From Guernica web magazine.
The intersection of language, dream, memory, brutality,and truth
30 Jun 2009
Format:Hardcover
Like all of us, Yalo is a man with guilt over what he has done. Like many of us, he is also a man with reasons for what he has done. Like few of us, Yalo is a man who does not demand pity, who does not see himself as a victim. Instead, he turns a horrible situation into one fraught with questions: who is he? what is he? what was he? how did he change? how do the traditions of his family and people affect him?
Yalo makes me question the idea of free will in ways that I hadn't before.
This is not a book for the faint of heart: it is a brutal book, both physically and morally. Its questions are not easily answered.
Yalo makes me question the idea of free will in ways that I hadn't before.
This is not a book for the faint of heart: it is a brutal book, both physically and morally. Its questions are not easily answered.
Were these reviews helpful?
Let us know
Customer Discussions
|
This product's forum
Active discussions in related forums
Search Customer Discussions
|
Related forums
|
Listmania!
Look for similar items by category
Look for similar items by subject
Feedback
- Would you like to update product info or give feedback on images?
- I am the Author, and I want to comment on my book.
- I am the Publisher, and I want to comment on this book.
