Broken Mirrors: Sinalcol [Paperback]

Karim Chammas returns to Lebanon, his family, and his past after ten years of establishing a new life in France. Back in Beirut, Karim reacquaints himself with his brother Nassim, now married to his former love Hind, and old friends from the leftist political circles within which he once roamed under the nom de guerre Sinalcol. By the end of his six-month stay, he has been reintroduced to the chaos of cultural, religious and political battles that continue to rage in Lebanon. Overwhelmed by the experiences of his return, Karim is forced to contemplate his identity and his place in Lebanon's history. The story of Karim and his family is born of other stories that intertwine to form an imposing fresco of Lebanese society over the past fifty years. Broken Mirrors examines the roots of an endemic civil war and a country's unsettled past. As a teller of tales and a spinner of stories, the Lebanese author Elias Khoury is on fire in his latest work of fiction, Broken Mirrors: Sinalcol. . . Though occasionally delirious, the patter of Khoury's tangential storytelling also feels well planned, as if he were quietly and deliberately building an argument about the capacity of art to beat back the sense that history is meaningless, repeating itself dumbly. . . The countervailing effect of Khoury's novel is to show how an entire world of literary forms—from pre-Islamic poetry to proverbs, oral storytelling traditions, and the tales within tales of A Thousand and One Nights—may be the more meaningful ancient phenomenon that returns, like overgrowth in a ruin, to heal and regenerate the culture of a badly damaged place. . . All those broken mirrors and fractured stories seem not chaotic or confusing but rather strangely hopeful, as if they could one day add up to a place where people who have hated and killed one anotl#7