The Lebanese novel was born out of the civil war that sowed destruction and devastation in Lebanon between 1975 and 1990. Out of this wound also emerged one of the greatest modern Arab writers – Elias Khoury.
They called it the Little Mountain. We knew it wasn't a mountain, but we still called it the Little Mountain.
This is how Khoury's debut novel, The Little Mountain, opens – highlighting the gap between language and reality, a gap that heralded the emergence of a new and subversive prose.
'The Little Mountain,' published in 1977, touches on various aspects of the chaos left in Lebanon by colonial rule - the rifts between Christians and Muslims, the Palestinian refugee camps, and the battles between military factions - a country where everyone is stirring the pot, everything is fluid, and alliances change in an instant.
Khoury described this disintegration with a new kind of poetics, a fragmentary and heterogeneous literature that renounced any commitment to a stable form. This “alloy” – as Edward Said defined it at the end of the book – created the necessary tools to “give voice to displaced exiles and trapped refugees, to the dissolution of borders and shifting identities, to radical demands and new languages.”
In "The Little Mountain," one can find all the characteristics that later became the hallmarks of Khoury's writing: fragments of autobiography, partly real and partly imagined, a night of times, a fractured syntax, and open violence.
