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A review by tessaays
Gate of the Sun by Elias Khoury
3.0
2.5 rounded up. Truly an epic in its scope and intention, and with some beautiful themes around story-telling, ageing, war, love, and hope. However, for me it tried to cover far too much material, in a way that irredeemably compromised its readability.
There is very little plot, and it reads mostly as a stream of consciousness, which made the story even more of a slog to follow. I failed to really build sympathy with any of the characters because the narrator jumped around so much. All of this is further exacerbated by the complete lack of chapters (or even paragraph breaks!), which made me want to give up even more. No reader is going to finish this book in a single session - give us some breaks!
On a practical note - I suspect the author fell into the trap of trying to include too great a volume of material from the interviews that informed this book in order to do justice to everyone that he spoke with. The volume of stories that are included perhaps does achieve the this justice, but for me it came at far too great a cost to readability.
There is very little plot, and it reads mostly as a stream of consciousness, which made the story even more of a slog to follow. I failed to really build sympathy with any of the characters because the narrator jumped around so much. All of this is further exacerbated by the complete lack of chapters (or even paragraph breaks!), which made me want to give up even more. No reader is going to finish this book in a single session - give us some breaks!
On a practical note - I suspect the author fell into the trap of trying to include too great a volume of material from the interviews that informed this book in order to do justice to everyone that he spoke with. The volume of stories that are included perhaps does achieve the this justice, but for me it came at far too great a cost to readability.