R A Y A | agency for Arabic literature
Richard Jacquemond reviews Stella Maris in Le Monde, November 2023
An Israeli Palestinian tries to find his place in a society that marginalizes him. “Stella Maris”, by Elias Khoury, is a magnificent epic.
With this poignant story, Yazbek writes about the magnificence and the cruelty of life, the destruction of worldly beauty and kindness, but also its resilience, and the elevation of the soul. Here, Yazbek goes back to one of her favorite topics: the transformation of the underprivileged rural communities of Syria, but also their unique relationship to nature and its elements.
Hisham Al Khattab is Yazid ibn Abih. At least he thinks he is. Some 13 centuries separate the two, but in the despaired mind of Hisham Al Khattab, and through the magical power of dreams, Hisham is Yazid.
The narrator, a zoo keeper, his girlfriend Nonna, and the giraffe (by far the zoo’s most popular figure), form a strange, yet happy family. This is their story, unfolding in the margins of the brutal Syrian war. Until violence can no longer be escaped.
Depicted as a story of curiosity and lust in the German press, Selamlik, autobiographic novel, tells the journey of Furat from his home in Syria, to Sweden, via Turkey. A surprising bitter-sweet homo-erotic tale.
By Tarek Abi Samra, L’Orient Littéraire, September 2023
The romantic character is generally only one of many elements used by the novelist to create a story. Other elements include plot, descriptions, point of view, narrative techniques, etc. However, the reader is spontaneously inclined to ignore all this and to see in a novel only the story of this or that character. A certain effort is in fact necessary to free oneself from this spontaneous reading and realize that the fictional character – even if he is both the protagonist and the …
An interview with Elias Khoury published in L’Humanité, November 9, 2023
The great Lebanese writer Elias Khoury just published Stella Maris, a vast epic on Palestine. He shares his thoughts on hot news of an Israeli-Palestinian conflict.
In Stella Maris (Actes Sud), Elias Khoury explores identity, memory, voluntary amnesia, betrayal and the relationships between the Shoah and the Nakba. Currently editor-in-chief of the Arabic edition of the Review Palestinian studies, Elias Khoury, Lebanese citizen (born in Beirut in 1948), decided, in the 1960s, to become a member of Fatah, then the largest …
By Muriel Steinmetz in L’Humanité, 9 Nov. 2023
Elias Khoury, in a novel with current resonances by the force of circumstances, brings to its height the paradox of the one who is lost, by simulating being the other who has despoiled his people.
Published in Politis, 19 October 2023
In Stella Maris, Elias Khoury tells the story of Adam, a Palestinian man living in Israel, born in 1948 in the Lodz Ghetto and, by force of circumstances, suffering from identity problems.
