Like a lot of authors of his generation and political tendency, Elias Khoury treats stories, histories especially, with suspicion. There's no paradox there: most arts are practised at least as often in a spirit of sceptical destruction as of classicist affirmation.
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Nevertheless, when one thinks of the literary novelists in whom the spirit of 1968 is strongest - I'm thinking of Jose Saramago, Thomas Pynchon, JMG Le Clezio, and perhaps Milan Kundera or Ismail Kadare - the common theme is an adversarial attitude to narrative quite different from the basically aesthetic disruptions of high modernist fiction or the nouvelle roman. These mostly post-mid-Sixties, mostly pre-mid-Eighties authors, treat stories not as material to be manipulated, but as a treacherous element in human affairs, to be inoculated against via a range of deconstructive strategies.
There's aversion therapy: like a child forced to smoke an entire packet of cigarettes so that he'll never be tempted to light up again, the reader is subjected to an overwhelming swarm of competing tales. There are instructive games involving narrators who are not so much unreliable as opaque, forever getting in the way, arguing with themselves or among themselves, holding up the action to deliver tendentious aphorisms.
There's parody, of course, of the opportunist tactics of official history, the self-protective rituals of scholarship, all tilted at the supposedly fanciful idea that one can ever get to the bottom of things. Magical realism, with its folksy doubtfulness, fantastical happenings and cyclical narratives, is rarely far away, though the point is less to luxuriate in strangeness than to frustrate the impulses of rationalist common sense.
This is a sensibility with a marked hostility to reductionism. Nevertheless, if one were to boil it all down to a single moral it might be one given in Pynchon's mock-18th-century novel Mason & Dixon: "Who claims Truth, Truth abandons. History is hir'd, or coerc'd, only in Interests that must ever prove base." Story is an instrument of power. The best mode of resistance is rambling novels filled with vague and shadowy goings-on - parades, as Pynchon recommends, of "fabulists and counterfeiters, Ballad-Mongers and Cranks of ev'ry Radius, Masters of Disguise..."
That describes a good deal of Elias Khoury's fiction. Still, as a Beiruti of Christian background, a former member of Fatah and a witness of civil war, occupation and massacre, his unease at the power of univocal narrative to trap people (or peoples) in a certain interpretation of events hardly seems frivolous. In his best books, Gate of the Sun and Yalo, the procedures of postmodernism come to mimic the fog of war. Unsettling scenes emerge from the obscurity of elision and superimposition, but their meaning quickly slips out of reach. The same goes for 2007's Ka'anaha Nae'ma, now appearing in English as As Though She Were Sleeping, though here the murk is thicker and the lucid passages are less memorable. In Yalo, the immediate action which the novel revolved around was the interrogation of an accused rapist and robber. Here, it is a woman slipping in and out of consciousness in a hospital bed. The results are correspondingly less gripping.
We move between Meelya's dreams and reminiscences, of her wedding night driving to a hotel in Chtaura, her peculiar marriage to Mansour, who spouts Arabic poetry but refuses to write any himself, of the couple's history in Beirut, Nazareth and Jaffa, the formation of Israel and many family legends. Meelya is a dedicated sleeper, more attached to her dream self, a lithe brown girl with green eyes, than to her own physical person. She insists on sleeping, or pretending to, while Mansour makes love to her (ambiguous rape is something of a signature of Khoury's fiction, as are mystic midwives and the byways of the Syriac church). Her dreams may or may not have prophetic powers - how could we know, when it is never clear whether or not we have left them behind? - but at any rate it is suggested that she meets certain other characters in her sleep before she encounters them in her waking life.
Accounts of dreams are proverbially very dull and Khoury gives us a lot of them. "The child looks at her and takes her into his eyes, and water encircles her on all sides. She tries to get out of the water of the eyes; she reaches out and feels that she is drowning," and so on. Then again, the novel sketches an argument for the idea that such reports ought to be infinitely interesting. "Poetry's a dream," Meelya tells Mansour. "The only way I can picture a poet is as someone who had a dream and wrote it down." And as Mansour says later: "I get bored when I hear the same story. See the difference from poetry: you can repeat a line of verse till kingdom come and feel the same ecstasy each time, but you can only listen to a story two or three times and then you get bored."
Whether Meeyla's written-down dreams rise to the level deathless poetry is a question of taste, of course, and smooth as Humphrey Davies's idiomatic translation is, it would be hard to judge from the English version. Besides, the important thing is the interplay between dreams, poems, rumours and, eventually, religious and national myths. ("History is a lie," announces Mansour in the course of a lecture on where arak comes from).
Indeed, as the novel progresses it almost comes to seem like an experimental comparison of two kinds of novelistic tedium: recounted dreams versus recurring mythic archetypes. Characters constantly mirror one another: Meelya agrees to marry Mansour because of his resemblance to her brother Moussa, for instance, and at their honeymoon hotel they are waited on by a pair of eerily similar maids whom they call Wadeea 1 and Wadeea 2, who in turn seem to appear in new guises at the hospital where Meelya gives birth. Such uncanny duplications are everywhere.
Meanwhile, the motif of a father killing his son grows increasingly insistent, established via the abducted child of a family maid and reiterated in Meelya's grandfather Saleem, rumoured to have thrown a stone at his own son when surprised during an assignation with a prostitute. The pattern echoes through a number of variations on the story of Abraham and Isaac, and several exuberantly heretical rewrites of Jesus's crucifixion. At length it is hinted that Meelya's own story may be yet another version of the latter, though perhaps only in the way that any story can be found in another if one is motivated enough to look for it.
In the end, though, such stories can get in the way of living. As Mansour complains when the couple moves to Nazareth: "I've had enough. No one can live in God's own city ..." (Meelya has by this point become convinced that she knows where Jesus's house is.) They also threaten to overshadow what is most diverting about Khoury's novel, though perhaps least consistent with its philosophical commitments. Khoury is a great collector of and contributor to Lebanese urban folklore, and As Though She Were Sleeping is never more enjoyable than when recounting, for instance, Meelya's strange experiences with a pair of notorious bone setters or when it claims that Beirut opposed the introduction of church bells because "this Frankish habit" would encourage young men to use the bell ropes to stage jumping competitions.
Novels are great repositories for unauthenticable rumour, and specious-sounding historical titbits like the bell-ringing story, or a digression on the introduction of trousers into the Arab world, are a standard tactic of the fretful postmodernist resistance. But notice how delightful these ones are, how full of fun. It's a common experience when reading in, say, Saramago, to see a few bright narrative fragments rising from the churn of symbol and innuendo and wish that the author could let his guard down, follow them for a while and let them take on the colours of a fully imagined reality. The same goes here. Perhaps that's an indulgence when dreadful forces are forever eliminating minority voices from the chorus of the present. Nevertheless, readers like to dream a little, too.
Ed Lake is the former deputy editor of The Review.
Emergency
Director: Kangana Ranaut
Stars: Kangana Ranaut, Anupam Kher, Shreyas Talpade, Milind Soman, Mahima Chaudhry
Rating: 2/5
Cryopreservation: A timeline
- Keyhole surgery under general anaesthetic
- Ovarian tissue surgically removed
- Tissue processed in a high-tech facility
- Tissue re-implanted at a time of the patient’s choosing
- Full hormone production regained within 4-6 months
How to avoid crypto fraud
- Use unique usernames and passwords while enabling multi-factor authentication.
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Super Saturday results
4pm: Mahab Al Shimaal Group 3 | US$350,000 | (Dirt) | 1,200m
Winner: Drafted, Pat Dobbs (jockey), Doug Watson (trainer).
4.35pm: Al Bastakiya Listed | $300,000 | (D) | 1,900m
Winner: Divine Image, Brett Doyle, Charlie Appleby.
5.10pm: Nad Al Sheba Turf Group 3 | $350,000 | (Turf) | 1,200m
Winner: Blue Point, William Buick, Charlie Appleby.
5.45pm: Burj Nahaar Group 3 | $350,000 | (D) | 1,600m
Winner: Muntazah, Jim Crowley, Doug Watson.
6.20pm: Dubai City of Gold Group 2 | $300,000 | (T) | 2,410m
Winner: Old Persian, William Buick, Charlie Appleby.
6.55pm: Al Maktoum Challenge Round 3 Group 1 | $600,000 | (D) | 2,000m
Winner: Capezzano, Mickael Barzalona, Salem bin Ghadayer.
7.30pm: Jebel Hatta Group 1 | $400,000 | (T) | 1,800m
Winner: Dream Castle, Christophe Soumillon, Saeed bin Suroor.
Gulf Under 19s final
Dubai College A 50-12 Dubai College B
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The biog
DOB: 25/12/92
Marital status: Single
Education: Post-graduate diploma in UAE Diplomacy and External Affairs at the Emirates Diplomatic Academy in Abu Dhabi
Hobbies: I love fencing, I used to fence at the MK Fencing Academy but I want to start again. I also love reading and writing
Lifelong goal: My dream is to be a state minister
Mercer, the investment consulting arm of US services company Marsh & McLennan, expects its wealth division to at least double its assets under management (AUM) in the Middle East as wealth in the region continues to grow despite economic headwinds, a company official said.
Mercer Wealth, which globally has $160 billion in AUM, plans to boost its AUM in the region to $2-$3bn in the next 2-3 years from the present $1bn, said Yasir AbuShaban, a Dubai-based principal with Mercer Wealth.
“Within the next two to three years, we are looking at reaching $2 to $3 billion as a conservative estimate and we do see an opportunity to do so,” said Mr AbuShaban.
Mercer does not directly make investments, but allocates clients’ money they have discretion to, to professional asset managers. They also provide advice to clients.
“We have buying power. We can negotiate on their (client’s) behalf with asset managers to provide them lower fees than they otherwise would have to get on their own,” he added.
Mercer Wealth’s clients include sovereign wealth funds, family offices, and insurance companies among others.
From its office in Dubai, Mercer also looks after Africa, India and Turkey, where they also see opportunity for growth.
Wealth creation in Middle East and Africa (MEA) grew 8.5 per cent to $8.1 trillion last year from $7.5tn in 2015, higher than last year’s global average of 6 per cent and the second-highest growth in a region after Asia-Pacific which grew 9.9 per cent, according to consultancy Boston Consulting Group (BCG). In the region, where wealth grew just 1.9 per cent in 2015 compared with 2014, a pickup in oil prices has helped in wealth generation.
BCG is forecasting MEA wealth will rise to $12tn by 2021, growing at an annual average of 8 per cent.
Drivers of wealth generation in the region will be split evenly between new wealth creation and growth of performance of existing assets, according to BCG.
Another general trend in the region is clients’ looking for a comprehensive approach to investing, according to Mr AbuShaban.
“Institutional investors or some of the families are seeing a slowdown in the available capital they have to invest and in that sense they are looking at optimizing the way they manage their portfolios and making sure they are not investing haphazardly and different parts of their investment are working together,” said Mr AbuShaban.
Some clients also have a higher appetite for risk, given the low interest-rate environment that does not provide enough yield for some institutional investors. These clients are keen to invest in illiquid assets, such as private equity and infrastructure.
“What we have seen is a desire for higher returns in what has been a low-return environment specifically in various fixed income or bonds,” he said.
“In this environment, we have seen a de facto increase in the risk that clients are taking in things like illiquid investments, private equity investments, infrastructure and private debt, those kind of investments were higher illiquidity results in incrementally higher returns.”
The Abu Dhabi Investment Authority, one of the largest sovereign wealth funds, said in its 2016 report that has gradually increased its exposure in direct private equity and private credit transactions, mainly in Asian markets and especially in China and India. The authority’s private equity department focused on structured equities owing to “their defensive characteristics.”
COMPANY PROFILE
Name: HyperSpace
Started: 2020
Founders: Alexander Heller, Rama Allen and Desi Gonzalez
Based: Dubai, UAE
Sector: Entertainment
Number of staff: 210
Investment raised: $75 million from investors including Galaxy Interactive, Riyadh Season, Sega Ventures and Apis Venture Partners
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More from Neighbourhood Watch:
Formula Middle East Calendar (Formula Regional and Formula 4)
Round 1: January 17-19, Yas Marina Circuit – Abu Dhabi
Round 2: January 22-23, Yas Marina Circuit – Abu Dhabi
Round 3: February 7-9, Dubai Autodrome – Dubai
Round 4: February 14-16, Yas Marina Circuit – Abu Dhabi
Round 5: February 25-27, Jeddah Corniche Circuit – Saudi Arabia
How to protect yourself when air quality drops
Install an air filter in your home.
Close your windows and turn on the AC.
Shower or bath after being outside.
Wear a face mask.
Stay indoors when conditions are particularly poor.
If driving, turn your engine off when stationary.
German intelligence warnings
- 2002: "Hezbollah supporters feared becoming a target of security services because of the effects of [9/11] ... discussions on Hezbollah policy moved from mosques into smaller circles in private homes." Supporters in Germany: 800
- 2013: "Financial and logistical support from Germany for Hezbollah in Lebanon supports the armed struggle against Israel ... Hezbollah supporters in Germany hold back from actions that would gain publicity." Supporters in Germany: 950
- 2023: "It must be reckoned with that Hezbollah will continue to plan terrorist actions outside the Middle East against Israel or Israeli interests." Supporters in Germany: 1,250
Source: Federal Office for the Protection of the Constitution
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More coverage from the Future Forum
Singham Again
Director: Rohit Shetty
Stars: Ajay Devgn, Kareena Kapoor Khan, Ranveer Singh, Akshay Kumar, Tiger Shroff, Deepika Padukone
Rating: 3/5
The Sand Castle
Director: Matty Brown
Stars: Nadine Labaki, Ziad Bakri, Zain Al Rafeea, Riman Al Rafeea
Rating: 2.5/5
The specs
Engine: 3.0-litre six-cylinder turbo
Power: 398hp from 5,250rpm
Torque: 580Nm at 1,900-4,800rpm
Transmission: Eight-speed auto
Fuel economy, combined: 6.5L/100km
On sale: December
Price: From Dh330,000 (estimate)
TUESDAY'S ORDER OF PLAY
Centre Court
Starting at 2pm:
Elina Svitolina (UKR) [3] v Jennifer Brady (USA)
Anastasia Pavlyuchenkova (RUS) v Belinda Bencic (SUI [4]
Not before 7pm:
Sofia Kenin (USA) [5] v Elena Rybakina (KAZ)
Maria Sakkari (GRE) v Aryna Sabalenka (BLR) [7]
Court One
Starting at midday:
Karolina Muchova (CZE) v Katerina Siniakova (CZE)
Kristina Mladenovic (FRA) v Aliaksandra Sasnovich (BLR)
Veronika Kudermetova (RUS) v Dayana Yastermska (UKR)
Petra Martic (CRO) [8] v Su-Wei Hsieh (TPE)
Sorana Cirstea (ROU) v Anett Kontaveit (EST)