Samir El-Youssef's second novel is an intellectually playful and poignant
disquisition on the state of the stateless. Its engaging, humorous
narrator is (like El Youssef), a Palestinian, born in a refugee camp in
Lebanon, who has fled to London, bearing the hidden wound of his sister's
untimely death. The novel recounts the story of his last, fateful
meeting with three friends in a Beirut cafe, at the time of the Israeli
incursion.
One, George, is a Christian Palestinian with Lebanese citizenship living
in a Muslim area of Beirut. While eschewing politics, George, an
avid student of Heidegger, muses endlessly on the Meaning of Being.
He hails his parents' loveless union as "a remarkable embodiment of
confronting the abyss of non-being".
Maher is a middle-class Muslim Marxist whose incitement to workers in a
Beirut factory to revolt leads to a family's ruin and his own
destruction. Ali has a brother whose sex life is such that the
resistance and Israeli forces both bring it into fatal focus.
Ali flees Lebanon for America. His return, almost 15 years later,
highlights the complex question of how far one can escape the past.
This is the "illusion" with which El-Youssef's narrator is
wrestling.
