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Elias Khoury's Gates of the City is an extraordinary novel that stands out among the works of fiction which have emerged from the Lebanese Civil War. Ghada Al-Samman in Beirut Nightmares, Hanan Al-Shaikh in Zahra's Tale, Laila Usairan in Usta's Citadel, Etel Adnan in Sitt Marie Rose, Halim Barakat in The Departure, and other Lebanese novelists in their respective works have dealt with more or less the same theme as does Khoury. What distinguishes Gates of the City is not so much its theme as the techniques and strategies employed by Khoury to constitute his work in to an extended moral fable rigged with an aggregate of symbols and metaphors that project the Lebanese trauma as a simulacrum of the human condition. As in Camus's novel The Plaque, the city becomes a microcosm of the modern world.
At one level, Khoury's novel offers a powerful oneiric reification of the infernal horror that life in Beirut was in the grip of a mindless war. Even the nightmarish episodes in Ghada Al-Samman's Beirut Nightmares are far less harrowing than the phantasmagoric travail of Khoury's nameless protagonist, lost in the perceptual labyrinth of a dream city where his senses flounder from one misperception to another. And yet the venue of the protagonist's unbefriended meaderings transmutes itself into an unspecified citadel of anarchy afflicted by the psychic dementia of the modern city, and the protagonist himself becomes, in effect, a sort of "Everyman...