A dizzying sense of displacement
Originally published in Arabic in 2012, ″The Broken Mirrors: Sinalcol″ was only translated into English this year. It contains many of the tropes that Elias Khoury readers will find familiar: shifting perspectives, an unreliable narrator, obscured memories, uncertain truths, and reflections upon narration. Nahrain al-Mousawi has read the book
Conveying a momentum of lulled and re-awakened chaos, ″The Broken Mirrors: Sinalcol″ looks back at life during Lebanon′s long civil war. The instability of the everyday is reflected in the disorder and episodism of the novel′s structure. Not confined to the linear, the narrative shifts about in time and out of place, reflecting the civil war′s dizzying sense of displacement in its bounding stories.