As author
Rabee Jaber
The author of fifteen novels, the Lebanese writer Rabee Jaber was born in Beirut in 1972. He is the editor of Afaaq, the weekly cultural supplement of Al-Hayat, the daily pan-Arab newspaper.
In this remarkable novella, Jaber merges the cinematic image and affective response to investigate the paradox of memory and imagination, the polarization of the city, and the irretrievably fractured sense of self left behind by the thousands of disappeared civilians during the Lebanese Civil War.
The author of fifteen novels, the Lebanese writer Rabee Jaber was born in Beirut in 1972. He is the editor of Afaaq, the weekly cultural supplement of Al-Hayat, the daily pan-Arab newspaper.
In this remarkable novella, Jaber merges the cinematic image and affective response to investigate the paradox of memory and imagination, the polarization of the city, and the irretrievably fractured sense of self left behind by the thousands of disappeared civilians during the Lebanese Civil War.
Abu-Zeid has made Rabee Jaber’s Beirut part of our imaginary landscape and added him to our constellation of fiction writers.
[An] unflinching thriller about trauma and forgiveness, set in the chaos of the Lebanese Civil War.
A book as unique as its subject matter – messy, incomplete, at times unreliable, yet as haunting and alluring as memories themselves.
Jaber is interested in what it means to live in and with fear, not for one season but for a whole generation, two generations, three. He’s interested in the bones of Beirut, a city that has had to rebuild itself repeatedly after being razed in war in 140 B.C., then devastated by the earthquake of 551, then again during the civil war, a city whose name derives from the Canaanite be’erot — “wells” — the water table that still sustains it. He’s interested in what lies beneath, what nourishes us without our knowing.
Jaber shares a delight in stories that defy conventional ideas about identity and the relations between East and West.
A slim, powerful volume, now in deft translation by Kareem James Abu-Zeid … [Jaber] is a major force in Arabic literature.
One of the greatest narrators on the Arabic scene.
At forty-two, the winner of the ‘Arabic Booker’ is it youngest recipient, and the judges praised the novel ‘for its powerful portrayal of the fragility of the human condition in highly sensitive prose.’
Like several of his other books, The Mehlis Report 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.