Alinea, Librairie Antoine book review

Gate Of The Sun: Bab Al-Shams by Elias Khoury
Told in the voice of a makeshift doctor, Khalil, talking to a comatose, aging Palestinian fighter, Yunes, Gate Of The Sun is a tapestry of stories. Using a strategy that is in an inversion of "A Thousand and One Nights", as Khalil believes his stories are keeping Yunes alive, Khoury narrates the Israeli-Palestinian conflict from the 1930s and up to the 1990s. The novel unfolds through Khalil’s memories and offers a humanizing vision of the said conflict, encouraging Palestinians to try and understand the holocaust: "in the faces of those people being driven to slaughter, didn't you see something resembling your own?" in order to see that there’s a part of them in the other.
The movie adaptation was released in 2004 and directed by Yousry Nasrallah. It is a long, hard and at times tragic film which tells of the long, hard and at times tragic story of the Palestinians.

الأجنحة المتكسرة (The broken wings) by Gibran Khalil Gibran
The Broken wings is the tale of a hopeless passion. Set in turn of the century Lebanon, it tells the story of a young man who falls for a woman betrothed to the nephew of a leading clergyman. When they are found out, she is locked up in her house and their love story crushed. Based on Gibran’s personnal experiences, this book explores many of Gibran’s recurrent themes: the condition of women in the Middle Eastern societies of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, the greed and corruption of the clergy, and the overwhelming power of love.
Gibran’s longest narrative was made into a movie directed by Yusuf Malouf in 1964. It was the first Lebanese film to be released in the United States.

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