Rashid al-Daif’s semi-autobiographical novel Passage to Dusk is one of the most harrowing, haunting, compelling, and entertaining – yes, entertaining (I’ll get to that later) books I have ever read. By examining the physical and psychological disintegration of its unnamed narrator, who has been severely wounded in an attack, al-Daif creates a painful meditation on the impact of the Lebanese civil war on an individual, on social relations, and on the country at large.
Like Beirut itself, the narrator has been dismembered and fragmented; his wholeness has been cut into components that he desperately tries to hold together – the physical dismembering that the narrator experiences reflects the fragmentation of his inner self.

The novel begins with what appears to be an ending – the death of the unnamed narrator at the hands of a number of armed men shortly after his return to his apartment after an extended absence: “And the rest I don’t remember. I was murdered on the spot.” The reader’s expectations are quickly confounded, however, when in the next scene, the events that had previously led to the narrator’s death are replayed, with slight variations, leading only the entry of his super, Abu Ali, who had been invited to the narrator’s apartment for reasons even the narrator cannot remember. Subsequent events take on a surreal and disorienting quality, as the narrator relates stories that seem to combine snippets of Abu Ali’s one-sided conversation with his own memories and fantasies. This stream-of-consciousness narrative frustrates the reader’s attempt to understand more than the simplest outlines of what ‘actually happens’ over the course of the novel. Oppressive and horrific events are continually revisited in changed form, as though the narrator were experiencing a recurring nightmare. The events to which he returns most obsessively are the most traumatic: his disfiguring accident and his death, both of which recur in a number of variations.

From the outset, the narrator himself admits that his presentation is of questionable accuracy. Among his killers, he sees Abu Ali, who also shoots him. “But how can that be, when the super was unarmed? It’s a serious flaw in my testimony. I admit. But I did see him with my own eyes. I saw him without a gun, shooting at me. His bullets pierced me just like the other bullets. Why would I want to lie now that I’m dead?” The narrator also frequently undermines his own testimony by commenting on the fact that he is taking lots of sleeping pills or is half asleep. The narrative “eye” jumps around a lot – al-Daif employs both limited and omniscient first person narration, in addition to having the main character jump inside other character’s eyes and perceptions on occasion. There really is no authoritative perspective.

This is an experimental novel and one which gains additional layers of complexity each time it is read. The style of the narrative is essential to – rather than incidental to – the story itself. The plot is minimal and unclear – to the extent that anything can be said to have happened, how it happened is completely negotiable. Even the characters are not stable – they turn into other characters; the main character himself turns into another character and lives an entirely different life at one point. The prose itself – even in translation – is amazing and painful.

But despite this, there are rare moments of totally unexpected humor – black humor, certainly, but humor nontheless. These moments generally occur immediately after some of the most painful, searing prose I’ve ever read. For instance, in one of the scenes describing the narrator’s loss of his arm, he says: “It was humiliating, to have my blood lapped by rats. It was humiliating to have rats reach my shoulder before someone could offer me a hand, before someone could save me, move me to a hospital, a clinic, or a house….But nobody came. How I wished that some human being would come up to me before I died. But no one did. So I got up, carrying my wounds, rising above the pain….I walked on towards Barbeer [a hospital]. When I reached Barbeer, no one asked me what was wrong. It was obvious.” (Italics mine) After such a horrifying passage, I have to confess, I laughed hysterically at that last line.

This is one of my favorite books – amazing on so many levels – and I could go on and on forever. Highly recommended. ( )