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Article: Beirut Blues.
- Article from:
- The Nation
- Article date:
- June 19, 1995
- Author:
CopyrightCOPYRIGHT 1995 The Nation Company L.P. This material is published under license from the publisher through the Gale Group, Farmington Hills, Michigan. All inquiries regarding rights should be directed to the Gale Group. (Hide copyright information)
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BEIRUT BLUES. By Hanan al-Shaykh. Translated by Catherine Cobham. Anchor/ Doubleday: 371 pp. $22.95.
In Hanan al-Shaykh's 1980 novel The Story of Zahra, the rooftop sniper on whom Zahra had fixated her romantic ideal of war in the end fixed her in his own gun's sights and shot her dead in the street. The Lebanese novelist set Zahra's story in the Beirut of the late 1970s, at the height of the civil war and at a time when the Palestinian struggle for national liberation and self-determination was still being waged by its representatives in the P.L.O. headquartered in Lebanon. A decade later, al-Shaykh's latest novel, Beirut Blues, eloquently translated by Catherine ...