Failing to leave a trace

IT is a cold night in the late 1940s and Meelya, a 23 year-old Lebanese woman, is dreaming of her wedding day and of her husband, a cultivated Palestinian named Mansour. But her dreams are confused, blurring into memories and at times even seeming to foretell the future, and her obsession with them leaves Mansour — let alone the reader — puzzled and disappointed.

Eschewing conventional chapters, As Though She Were Sleeping is divided into three long sections delineating the first, second, and third nights of Meelya’s dreaming. Within this structure, Elias Khoury tells the story of Meelya’s family and upbringing, her curious marriage and the grand narrative of revolt and dispossession which characterises Arab, in particular Palestinian, history during this time.

Khoury gives himself a lot to work with here yet the organising principle is ‘the logic of dreams’ and so, in practice, no logic at all. The rapid-fire burst of oneiric overload which opens the novel in a case in point; it attempts to be daring, to dazzle with its quick-shot cavalcade of imagery, but it is too scattershot, too choppy to achieve anything of the sort. Yes the novel eventually settles down into longer vignettes but the reader has already been dissuaded of its merits.

Khoury, from a Lebanese Christian background, is one of the most visible literary and academic figures to hail from the Arab world. A professor of Islamic Studies at New York University, he is the author of 12 other novels including the well received Yalo and The Gate of the Sun, that latter of which wove together real-life tales collected by the author from the Palestinian refugee camps.

As Though She Were Sleeping attempts something similar but the result never coheres into anything special. Meelya is too a passive protagonist, literally unconscious for most of the novel. Mansour is a more developed character however one cannot root for him either. Frustrated by Meelya’s puritan attitude to sex, and simultaneously enthralled by the declarations of love throughout the Arabic poetic canon, Mansour is driven to do terrible things.

More successful is the novel’s depiction of the Middle East’s Christian Arabs. Khoury provides an insider’s view of communities at the confluence of centuries of conflict between region, race, and politics. Here their worship is seen through another dream, one in which ‘the distance between the loving and the dead had been erased so that they were all dead’.

This kind of grimness typifies the book, and, while digressions on the Syriac Church are interesting, they are not capable of awakening the novel from its indomitable slumber.

Indeed, As Though She Were Sleeping is itself like a dream — one which has passed and has left little trace in the conscious mind.