Disciples of Passion

In this brief, enigmatic novel by award-winning Lebanese author Barakat (The Tiller of Waters; The Stone of Laughter), an unnamed Christian narrator tells of his relationship with a Muslim woman during Lebanon's civil war. It's a fragmentary cri de coeur told in retrospect from the confines of a Church-run insane asylum with the menace of war still very present. A series of charged events-murder, kidnapping, mortar attacks-add urgency to the narrative, but these are never arranged into a plot, and the reader is left with less a storyline than a sense of a complete breakdown of memory, identity and all forms of certainty, with the narrator at one point remarking, ""Why, I'm barely able to keep myself convinced that I'm really here..."" This is no Romeo and Juliet style romance: at times it seems as if the surrounding inter-ethnic strife is the least of the lovers' problems, and their increasingly tormented relationship is more an embodiment of the war and alienation around them than a romantic gesture of defiance. The novel's impassioned, poetic prose (superbly translated from the Arabic by Marilyn Booth) teems with strange visions, religious diction and imagery, and drifts into discursive riffs on the impossibility of knowing the ""other."" Published by the Syracuse University Press as part of its Middle East literature in translation series, this volume seems destined for an academic audience.