Gate of the Sun

In the Shatila refugee camp in Beirut, after the 1982 massacre, the makeshift doctor Khalil keeps vigil over the comatose old fighter Yunes, telling him the interwoven stories of the Palestinian catastrophe. The frame is the camp; the tales range back to the Galilee villages emptied in 1948, to the cave called Bab al-Shams where Yunes crossed the border to meet his wife, and to the long exile in Lebanon, holding a whole people's memory in one dying man's room.

Khalil

Shatila camp (Khalil's vigil)

The frame

By the bedside of the comatose Yunes, Khalil talks night after night, pouring out the tangled stories of a people's exile in the hope of keeping the old man alive. The squalid camp, ringed by war and loss, becomes the vessel in which the whole memory of the Palestinian catastrophe is held and retold.

Framing narrative

explicit The novel is framed in the Shatila refugee camp in Beirut, the real Palestinian camp, where the untrained doctor Khalil tends the dying Yunes in a makeshift hospital after the 1982 war.

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Khalil

The Shatila massacre (1982)

The frame

The massacre of 1982, still fresh in the camp's walls and memory, is the immediate horror against which Khalil's storytelling is set, one atrocity folded into a century of them. Khoury refuses any consoling shape, letting the stories contradict and repeat as memory really does, an epic made of a whole people's wounds.

Framing narrative

explicit The Sabra and Shatila massacre of 1982, in which militias killed hundreds of camp civilians, is the recent catastrophe hanging over Khalil's vigil; it took place at the real camp in Beirut.

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