Elias Khoury, a Lebanese writer whose sweeping, intricately rendered tales of postwar life in the Middle East won him praise as one of the greatest modern Arabic novelists, and whose editorial leadership of some of Lebanon’s leading publications made him an arbiter of his country’s turbulent political culture, died on Sunday in Beirut. He was 76.
His daughter, Abla Khoury, confirmed the death, in a hospital, adding that her father had been in declining health for several months.
Mr. Khoury’s writing, both fiction and journalism, often focused on the twin events that defined his world: the Lebanese civil war, from 1975 to 1990, and the plight of Palestinians after the founding of Israel, particularly the tens of thousands who fled to Lebanon in 1948 and after the Six-Day War of 1967.
As a novelist, Mr. Khoury was often compared with the American writer James A. Michener, who in books like “Hawaii” (1959) and “Texas” (1985) attempted to capture epic swaths of history in an intimate narrative.
But if his vision was Michenerian, his prose was Faulknerian, driven by interweaving, stream-of-conscious narratives. He also claimed Vladimir Nabokov and Italo Calvino as influences.
“He was a novelist who thought deeply about form and genre and language, and then used those skills and that sort of reflection and applied them to events,” Ghenwa Hayek, a professor of modern Arabic literature at the University of Chicago, said in an interview.
His modernist style represented a sharp break with the legacy of Naguib Mahfouz, the Egyptian writer widely regarded as the father of the modern Arab novel, whose own weighty historical works drew influence from Sir Walter Scott, Victor Hugo and other 19th-century European writers.
Mr. Khoury felt that the constant turmoil of war, displacement and oppression that marked the modern Arab world required a new type of novel, one that reflected his era’s discombobulated reality. Often beginning with a single, sustained encounter, his novels spin outward, kaleidoscopically, into the past and across borders.
“I was trying to express the fragmentation of society,” he said in a 2007 interview with The Guardian. “Beirut’s past is not of stability, but of violent change. Everything is open, uncertain. In my fiction, you’re not sure if things really happened, only that they’re narrated. What’s important is the story, not the history.”
He achieved such an effect with “Gate of the Sun,” perhaps his best-known novel, which appeared in Arabic in 1998 and English in 2006. Its narrative frame involves a medical worker speaking to a comatose Palestinian fighter, recounting life stories the fighter told him over the years — stories that begin to alter the reader’s assumptions about the novel’s reality.
“There has been powerful fiction about Palestinians and by Palestinians, but few have held to the light the myths, tales and rumors of both Israel and the Arabs with such discerning compassion,” the novelist Lorraine Adams wrote in her 2006 review in The New York Times. The book, she added, “is an imposingly rich and realistic novel, a genuine masterwork.”
Another book, “Yalo” (2002 in Arabic; 2008 in English), centers on a young man accused of rape who has to defend himself to the police by telling a different version of his story for days — a twist on “One Thousand and One Nights,” the classic collection of Arabic folk tales.
Mr. Khoury wrote 13 other novels, along with three plays, two short story collections, two screenplays and five books of criticism — evidence of the wide scope of his literary talents.
He did not set out to be a novelist; after receiving a doctorate from the Sorbonne in Paris, he embarked on a career as a literary critic in Beirut. He sat on the editorial boards of several small but influential Lebanese journals, and from 1992 to 2009 edited the cultural section of An-Nahar, one of the leading Arabic-language newspapers.
He continued as a journalist even as he branched out into fiction and theater, two forms that he argued gave him more room to explore truths that are often hard to unpack through conventional nonfiction.
“Writing was very important because it gave me the chance to rethink and to understand what was going on,” he said in a 2001 interview published in Banipal, a literary journal that promotes the publication of works by Arab authors in English. “The imaginary level that is part of every fiction made it possible for me to create some distance from the political practice, and to criticize it.”
His prominence as one of Beirut’s leading intellectuals gave him significant sway over the course of Lebanese civil society, especially as it tried to rebuild after its devastating civil war. He took a stand as an independent truth-teller, an advocate for causes like democracy and Palestinian rights but also someone willing to call out falsehoods where he found them.
Mr. Khoury joined the Palestine Liberation Organization in 1967, but later distanced himself from the group in order to claim independence as a writer. At times, he even clashed with it — the group tried to ban his book “White Masks” (1981 in Arabic, 2010 in English) because its tale of a journalist found dead in a dumpster was deemed critical of the Palestinian organization.
“I was the only one in Lebanon and Palestine who wrote a novel critical of the civil war,” he told the London-based literary quarterly magazine Granta in 2013, “but I have a moral obligation to be critical in that way.”
Elias Iskandar Khoury was born on July 12, 1948, in Beirut, to Adele and Iskandar Khoury, a midlevel executive for Mobil. Though he was born into an Oriental Orthodox Christian family, he grew up in a secular, Westernized community, one that among other things blamed Arab countries for the losses during the 1948 war with Israel and the subsequent plight of the Palestinians.
When he was 19, he traveled to a Palestinian refugee camp in Amman, Jordan, where he encountered a different story: that the expulsion of Palestinians during the founding of Israel, what many call the Nakba, or “catastrophe,” was the result of a systematic plan by Israel to clear land for settlers.
“To talk about memories of the Nakba is false, because we are living the Nakba,” he told the Israeli newspaper Haaretz in 2014. “Historically, I do not feel that we can start anything serious unless the Nakba is brought to an end.”
He received a bachelor’s degree in history from the Lebanese University in Beirut in 1970, and a doctorate, also in history, from the Sorbonne in 1973.
Along with his daughter, his survivors include his wife, Najla; his son, Talal; and a grandson.
Mr. Khoury’s dissertation dealt with an 1860 conflict in what is now Lebanon between Christians and Druse, a sect that split from Islam in the 11th century. The fighting killed some 25,000 people but, he found, it was hardly written about by Lebanese historians.
The theme of national memory runs through much of his subsequent writing. The interplay of myths and history was critical to a society’s well-being, he said, and it was often the first thing that occupiers tried to take away.
“I’m not interested in memory as such, I’m interested in the present,” he told The Paris Review in 2017. “But to have a present, you have to know which things to forget and which things to remember.”
The post Elias Khoury, Master of the Modern Arabic Novel, Dies at 76 appeared first on New York Times.
