Literature as coerced testimony

Siddhartha Deb reviews three novels by the Lebanese writer Elias Khoury for The Nation. One of them, Yalo, is concerned with a Lebanese Christian rapist and thief who is being tortured while in prison.

The interrogators who question Yalo, sometimes singly, sometimes in pairs, possess no names and have few defining features. This is because one sees them from Yalo's point of view. Starved, beaten, humiliated and subject to what the interrogators call "torture parties," Yalo understands quickly enough that he must provide a story these men consider satisfactory. Of course, it becomes apparent that the investigators are not interested in verifying the truth of Yalo's confessions as much as in extracting a version of truth that suits their needs and is presented in a suitably bureaucratic language.

But the novel of Khoury's that Siddhartha likes most is Gate of the Sun, which he calls "a lyrical and haunting meditation on Palestinian history from the Nakba of 1948 to the early '90s."