Yalo, Elias Khoury
Yalo, Elias Khoury
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Yalo

Author: Elias Khoury, Peter Theroux

Narrator: Peter Ganim

Unabridged: 11 hr 59 min

Format: Digital Audiobook Download

Published: 07/19/2022

Synopsis

Elias Khoury’s novel Yalo propels us into a fantastic universe of skewed reality that leaves us breathless to the last sentence.We follow the path of a young man, Yalo, who is growing up like a stray dog on the streets of Beirut during the long years of the Lebanese civil war. Living with his mother, who “lost her face in the mirror,” he falls in with a dangerous gang whose violent escapades he treats as a game. The game becomes a frightening reality, however, when Yalo is accused of rape and imprisoned. He is forced to confess to crimes of which he has no recollection. As he writes, and rewrites, he begins to grasp his family’s past and recall all that his psyche has buried, and the true Yalo begins to emerge.

About Elias Khoury

Elias Khoury is the author of a dozen novels, four volumes of literary criticism, and several plays. Editor of the cultural pages of Beirut’s An-Nahar, Khoury is also a global distinguished professor at New York University.

About Peter Ganim

Peter Ganim, an Earphones Award–winning narrator, is an American actor who has appeared on stage, on television, and in film. He has performed voice-over work since 1994.

Reviews

Goodreads review by Jim on June 25, 2021

{Edited and pictures added 6/25/21} A story from Beirut’s civil war, more-or-less on-going since the 1980’s. The book focuses on one young man who represents the diversity of the country: he’s of Arab ancestry but a Maronite Christian whose grandfather was a Kurd. The young man fights in one of the w......more

Goodreads review by Elena on July 06, 2023

Yalo is NOT a likeable character. He is young, coarse, rather dim-witted. Also he is a thug, a thief, a rapist. YALO (first published in Beirut in 2002, translated from the Arabic by Peter Theroux and published in 2008) narrates his story, from his perspective. At the outset, he is a prisoner who is......more

Goodreads review by DubaiReader on February 09, 2017

I cannot believe I am still reading this book! (Nearly a month later). It churns and churns, repeating itself endlessly, maybe adding a little more detail with each telling. And the torture, I hate reading about torture; maybe I have my head in the sand but it distresses me that people can be so cruel......more

Goodreads review by Ronald on February 24, 2016

This book is written in shadows pierced by a flashlight beam, dancing with illuminated colors. The text clogs your nostrils with the stench of pine sap, and incense, and blood and excrement. The words coat your tongue with the tastes of cuttlefish ink and sanctified wine clotted with blood and fills......more

Quotes

“How to write Beirut?…With words and images that stumble with weariness, that collapse from the heat, from the stone which composes them only to crumble in turn?…This is why Khoury’s fiction is so powerful. The intent of the writing is to restore [Beirut’s] soul.” Tahar Ben Jelloun, Nobel Prize–nominated author

“Elias Khoury’s Yalo is a novel that transcends—as only art can—the deep divisiveness of ideology, both political and religious. Yalo speaks to our universal humanity, to our profound longing for a realization of self, and for a connection to others.” Robert Olen Butler, Pulitzer Prize–winning author

“Khoury refuses to give the reader an easy position from which to judge Yalo—either as a poor soul or a serial rapist, criminal or victim of torture—or from which to judge Lebanon’s tragic and violent fate. His novel is a dense and stunning work of art.” Publishers Weekly

“A heartbreaking book and sometimes hypnotic in its beauty…With both gentle and cruel images, Khoury wrote a lamentation for the generation that was corrupted and lost its children, and for the children themselves.” Haaretz (Israel)

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