Elias Khoury, The Art of Fiction No. 233
Elias Khoury, The Art of Fiction No. 233 Interviewed by Robyn Creswell ISSUE 220, SPRING 2017 ELIAS KHOURY, IN 2007. Elias Khoury is the foremost novelist writing in Arabic today. Born in Beirut in the fateful year of 1948, he published his second novel, Little Mountain (1977), during the opening phase of the long Lebanese civil war, in which he fought with pro-Palestinian forces against his Christian coreligionists of the Phalange. Khoury’s early work is fearlessly contemporary, addressing itself to Lebanon’s conflict even as events were unfolding. In novels such as White Masks (1981) and The Journey of Little Gandhi (1989), Khoury held up the broken mirror of his fiction to a country on the verge of falling apart. Khoury’s best-known novel is Gate of the Sun (1998), which the New York Times labeled “a genuine masterwork.” It is the fruit of Khoury’s many years spent in the Palestinian camps of Lebanon, wher...