Rabee Jaber
As author
Rabee Jaber
The author of fifteen novels, the Lebanese writer Rabee Jaber was born in Beirut in 1972. He is the editor of Afaaq, the weekly cultural supplement of Al-Hayat, the daily pan-Arab newspaper.
In this remarkable novella, Jaber merges the cinematic image and affective response to investigate the paradox of memory and imagination, the polarization of the city, and the irretrievably fractured sense of self left behind by the thousands of disappeared civilians during the Lebanese Civil War.
Confessions
by Rabee Jaber
Translated by Kareem James Abu-Zeid
During the violence and chaos of the Lebanese Civil War, a car pulls up to a roadblock on a narrow side street in Beirut. After a brief and confused exchange, several rounds of bullets are fired into the car, killing everyone in the car except for a small boy of four or five. The boy is taken to the hospital, adopted by one of the assassins, and raised in a new family.
“My father used to kidnap and kill people…” begins this haunting tale of a child who was raised by the murderer of his real family. The narrator of Confessions doesn’t shy away from the horrible truth of his murderous father—instead he confronts his troubled upbringing and seeks to understand the distortions and complexities of his memories, his war-torn country, and the quiet war that rages inside of him.
Finalist for the PEN Translation Prize and PEN Center USA Translation Award.
The Mehlis Report
by Rabee Jaber
Translated by Kareem James Abu-Zeid
A complex thriller, The Mehlis Report introduces English readers to a highly talented Arabic writer. When former Lebanese prime minister Rafiq Hariri is killed by a massive bomb blast, the U.N. appoints German judge Detlev Mehlis to conduct an investigation of the attack — while explosions continue to rock Beirut. Mehlis’s report is eagerly awaited by the entire Lebanese population.
First we meet Saman Yarid, a middle-aged architect who wanders the tense streets of Beirut and, like everyone else in the city, can’t stop thinking about the pending report. Saman’s sister Josephine, who was kidnapped in 1983, narrates the second part of The Mehlis Report: Josephine is dead, yet exists in a bizarre underworld in the bowels of Beirut where the dead are busy writing their memoirs. Then the ghost of Hariri himself appears…
In this remarkable novella, Jaber merges the cinematic image and affective response to investigate the paradox of memory and imagination, the polarization of the city, and the irretrievably fractured sense of self left behind by the thousands of disappeared civilians during the Lebanese Civil War.
Abu-Zeid has made Rabee Jaber’s Beirut part of our imaginary landscape and added him to our constellation of fiction writers.
[An] unflinching thriller about trauma and forgiveness, set in the chaos of the Lebanese Civil War.
A book as unique as its subject matter – messy, incomplete, at times unreliable, yet as haunting and alluring as memories themselves.
Jaber is interested in what it means to live in and with fear, not for one season but for a whole generation, two generations, three. He’s interested in the bones of Beirut, a city that has had to rebuild itself repeatedly after being razed in war in 140 B.C., then devastated by the earthquake of 551, then again during the civil war, a city whose name derives from the Canaanite be’erot — “wells” — the water table that still sustains it. He’s interested in what lies beneath, what nourishes us without our knowing.
Jaber shares a delight in stories that defy conventional ideas about identity and the relations between East and West.
A slim, powerful volume, now in deft translation by Kareem James Abu-Zeid … [Jaber] is a major force in Arabic literature.
One of the greatest narrators on the Arabic scene.
— Egypt Independent
At forty-two, the winner of the ‘Arabic Booker’ is it youngest recipient, and the judges praised the novel ‘for its powerful portrayal of the fragility of the human condition in highly sensitive prose.’
— The Guardian
Like several of his other books, The Mehlis Report is held together less by its plot or characters than by its uncanny way of capturing the zeitgeist. It reads like a historical novel that happens to be about the very recent past.
— The New York Review of Books
