Béla Malina’s Reviews > Gate of the Sun > Status Update
Béla Malina
is on page 227 of 501
Okay so this book is really special. I’ve been reading this for over 3 months now (though I had several weeks in between of not reading it at all. For Anna Karenina mostly). Khoury writes about Palestinian exile, ethnic cleansing and about its armed and unarmed resistance. And all in stream of consciousness. This book isn’t linear at all. It is set in a dilapidated hospital in a refugee camp outside Beirut…
— Dec 22, 2025 08:21AM
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Béla Malina’s Previous Updates
Béla Malina
is on page 194 of 501
A woman alone (…) hunched over on herself in that emptiness that stretches all the way to God, among the hills and valleys of Galilee, within the circle of a red sun that crawls over the ground, passing slowly and carrying with it the shadows of all things.
— Dec 19, 2025 05:05PM
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Dec 22, 2025 08:30AM
Dr Khalil (who isn’t a real doctor) cares for his spiritual father Yunis who is in a coma and mostly likely hasn’t long to live. And the whole novel is just him talking to his unresponsive spiritual father trying to retrace his people’s exile and struggle towards liberation with all its tragedy, humour, and longing for Palestine. The narrator jumps from story to story and from anecdote to anecdote, and we wonder (in fact he wonders too) how much of these tales is true and to what degree. Did the hero really die in this ideally heroic way or was he actually cowardly and died in vain for a lost cause? The story often details individuals being lost and never found. What happened to them? Were they killed by the Israelis? Did they find their way to Syria perhaps? People’s fates are nebulous in the smoke of exile. This book is great. I will likely finish it in January or a least February.
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