Yalo

Book 0: Rainmaker Translations

by Elias Khoury, Peter Theroux

Genres: Literary Fiction; War & Military

Synopsis

Elias Khoury’s novel Yalo propels us into a fantastic universe of skewed reality that leaves us breathless to the last sentence.

We follow the path of a young man, Yalo, who is growing up like a stray dog on the streets of Beirut during the long years of the Lebanese civil war. Living with his mother, who “lost her face in the mirror,” he falls in with a dangerous gang whose violent escapades he treats as a game. The game becomes a frightening reality, however, when Yalo is accused of rape and imprisoned. He is forced to confess to crimes of which he has no recollection. As he writes, and rewrites, he begins to grasp his family’s past and recall all that his psyche has buried, and the true Yalo begins to emerge.

Release date: December 31, 2007

Publisher: Archipelago

Print pages: 317

Sample

Yalodidnotunderstandwhatwashappening.
The young man stood before the interrogator and closed his eyes. He always closed his eyes when he faced danger, when he was alone, and when his mother . . . On that day too, the morning of Thursday, December 22, 1993, he closed his eyes involuntarily.
Yalo did not understand why everything was white.
He saw the white interrogator, sitting behind a white table, the sun refracting on the glass window behind him, and his face bathed in reflected light. All Yalo saw were halos of light and a woman walking through the city streets, tripping on her shadow.
Yalo closed his eyes for a moment, or so he thought.