Arak is a clear, aniseed-flavored liquor consumed throughout the Middle East that drinkers typically dilute with water to create a cloudy white concoction. In Gate of the Sun, the 11th novel by Lebanese novelist and critic Elias Khoury, meals are often accompanied by a glass — or three — of arak, and the author manages the same alchemical transformation with his book, pouring one story into another to create a murky, rambling account of Palestinian villagers living in exile.

Eight years after it appeared in Arabic, Khoury’s tome, in Humphrey Davies’ English translation, is a cavernous monologue of more than 500 pages. Khalil, our narrator, tells the story of the Palestinian people since the Nakba, or “disaster,” as they refer to the founding of the state of Israel, through a disjointed stream of consciousness, waxing philosophic at each twist of his conflicting memories. One moment, he recalls figures of the resistance, big and small, in anecdotal digressions that take the reader through painfully vivid background. In another, he delves into the minutiae of a Palestinian family’s escape to the Lebanese border, citing each village through which they passed. Roughly 80 percent of the Palestinian population left Israel during al-Nakba (though exactly how many were forced to flee and how many left voluntarily remains a sensitive question), and the event has had a profound effect on Palestinian identity, most visibly in the demand for the Right of Return, one of the main tenets of the Hamas platform, and a non-starter in Arab-Israeli negotiations for more than 50 years. The overall effect of Khalil’s meandering yarns is a story more interesting and important for its view onto the Palestinian experience than it is consistently enjoyable to read.

Khalil is a peasant doctor in the Shatila refugee camp outside Beirut, site of a 1982 massacre perpetrated by Lebanese Maronite Christian militias for which Ariel Sharon, among others, was later found indirectly responsible. He has sequestered himself in a dilapidated hospital with his old comrade, Yunes, who lies unconscious and dying. There Khalil reminisces ad infinitum in a one-sided discussion. In his unorthodox medical opinion, storytelling can sustain and even resuscitate Yunes where conventional medicine has failed. It has kept the Palestinian struggle alive, though Khalil points out that the videotape has come to replace the storyteller. “We sit in front of the small screen and see small spots, distorted pictures and close-ups, and from these we invent the country we desire,” he says. “We invent our life through pictures.”

Khalil’s story bounds back and forth over the last 60 years, threading vignettes together in an attempt to capture the Palestinian experience as lived and remembered by the people themselves. He was born in a village in Galilee but grew up in refugee camps in Lebanon. The physical and psychological wounds inflicted by the Nakba feed Khalil much of his material. He populates his narrative with mothers, grandmothers, husbands, sons, and fighters — all attempting to live a life on hold. They cannot return to their homes in Israeli territory, and the Lebanese won’t grant them work permits (a policy guided by the quixotic belief that the Palestinians would soon be able to return home, turning them into permanent refugees).

The tales begin with the death of Umm Hassan, a childless midwife in the Shatila refugee camp. From there it roams through the Palestinian resistance under the British mandate in the 1930s to the forced evacuations of Palestinian villages after the founding of Israel in 1948, to French actors looking for inspiration in their production of Jean Genet’s Quatre heures à Chatila, but always returning to the women in their lives. Khalil is fascinated by the story of Yunes and his wife Nahilah, who met only in secret over the decades of their marriage because he was wanted by the Israelis as a “saboteur.” Again and again, Yunes would sneak to his wife’s village in Israel over the mountainous border from Lebanon. They would meet in Bab al-Shams (Arabic for “Gate of the Sun”) to make love and talk of the resistance. The Israelis, who are trying to capture Yunes, harass Nahilah. She resists in the only way she can, insisting that she is pregnant because she is a whore rather giving up her husband. Khalil retells these stories to the comatose Yunes while contemplating his own tragic affair with a sensuous, iconoclastic woman who murdered her husband but suffered his family’s ultimate revenge.

The power of these stories lies in their mixture of tragic hardships with Khalil’s frank criticism of himself, the Palestinians, and the feeble attempts by Arab armies to repel the onslaught of the Israeli army in 1948. Each is revealed in the spiraling, sometimes confusing patterns of oral storytelling. And in retelling the stories of other refugees Khalil weaves his own life into the patchwork fabric of the Palestinian refugee experience, replete with worn threads, holes, and loose endings.

The literary model for Khoury’s work may be 1,001 Arabian Nights, but whereas Scheherazade told her stories in order to escape her own death at the hands of her listener, Khalil regales Yunes in order to keep him alive. “I’m trying to rouse you with my stories because I’m certain that the soul can, if it wants, wake a sleeping body.” He keeps Yunes alive because he’s not sure what would become of him without his fallen comrade, a hero of the Palestinian resistance. Yunes’ coma gives Khalil an excuse to wallow in a state of suspended animation, of permanent reminiscence. “If you die, what will become of me?” he asks.

To recreate the Palestinian experience in the Galilee and Lebanon — thus far told to the outside world almost entirely by Israeli historians — Khoury purportedly conducted extensive archival research and interviews at the refugee camps outside Beirut. While those same Israeli historians have disputed some of his accounts, Khoury’s narrator admits his claims of atrocities and hardships are unsound. Khalil is retelling second- and third-hand stories that he might not believe in the first place. They aren’t necessarily fictional, but the same story often has multiple variations depending upon the teller. It is in the accumulation of these tales, full of contradictions and half-truths as much as shocking accounts of injustices and injuries, that Khoury/Khalil builds his Palestinian epic. “Like all prisoners, I live on memories. Prison is a storytelling school: Here we can go wherever we want, twist our memory however we please. Right now, I’m playing with your memory and mine.”

Gate of the Sun takes on the individual stories of refugees who cling to hopes of returning to their villages that have become Israeli suburbs. But more enlightening are the issues of memory, identity, truth, and how the storytelling process itself affects all of these issues. The end result is profound and haunting (the description of “sun baths,” a torture tactic used by Israeli soldiers, is horrifying), but it also feels slightly hollow. The reader is left with an impression of little more than a permanent state of suffering among the Palestinians. Lamentation is rarely balanced with stories of humor, of life lived in between the tragedies and the disappointments.

But in his nuanced description of the Arab-Israeli conflict, Khoury is able to escape political rhetoric and touch on the truths so often left out of the headlines. “Palestine was the cities — Haifa, Jaffa, Jerusalem, and Acre. In them we could feel something called Palestine. The villages were like all villages. It was the cities that fell quickly, and we discovered that we didn’t know where we were. The truth is that those who occupied Palestine made us discover the country as we were losing it.”

In The Fray Contributor