Synopses & Reviews
A complex thriller,
The Mehlis Report introduces English readers to a highly talented Arabic writer. When former Lebanese prime minister Rafiq Hariri is killed by a massive bomb blast, the U.N. appoints German judge Detlev Mehlisto conduct an investigation of the attack — while explosions continue to rock Beirut. Mehlis’s report is eagerly awaited by the entire Lebanese population.
First we meet Saman Yarid, a middle-aged architect who wanders the tense streets of Beirut and, like everyone else in the city, can’t stop thinking about the pending report. Saman’s sister Josephine, who was kidnapped in 1983,narrates the second part of The Mehlis Report: Josephine is dead, yet exists in a bizarre underworld in the bowels of Beirut where the dead are busy writing their memoirs. Then the ghost of Hariri himself appears…
Review
"Jaber's novel evokes this unsettled period with frightening precision. Like several of his other books, is held together less by its plot or characters than by its uncanny way of capturing the zeitgeist. It reads like a historical novel that happens to be about the very recent past. Jaber seems to think of fiction primarily as a speculative way of writing history. It is not so much concerned with what happened as with what might have happened. He views the past not as an accumulation of facts (though the facts are important), but as a field of unrealized potential, a series of paths not taken, or missed opportunities." The New York Review of Books
Review
"This novel is a bittersweet love song to Beirut. This novel -- this elegy for a lost Beirut, past and future -- this novel was carrying me to a place I had never been before." Alan Cheuse
Synopsis
The English-language debut of 2012'sInternational Arabic Fiction Prize winner
About the Author
The author of fifteen novels, the Lebanese writer Rabee Jaber was born in Beirut in1972. He is the editor of Afaaq, the weekly cultural supplement of Al-Hayat, the daily pan-Arab newspaper.Half American and half Egyptian, Kareem James Abu-Zeid is completing his Ph.D.at the University of California, Berkeley.