Book Review: Beirut Noir

 There are cities carrying the heavy weight of their unhappy circumstances...

There is a deep sense of despair pertaining from the 15 short stories included in Beirut Noir, published by Akashic Books part of their Noir Series. 

´A city that dances in his wounds´ is one of the many descriptions that seems to fit a city whose pain is with no end in sight. Dismantled by sectarian violence, war, war again, civil war, haunted by death and accidents and despair, Beirut is creating its own geography delineated with blood and cemetery stones. But is doing it with glamour, that desperate breath of life that no one can take it away from a body fighting hard to pump air in its lungs. No matter how precarious is this air.

Originally written in English, French and Arabic, the stories are showing a city that one will never found in any touristic brochures (facing the threats of all kind, people used to visit Lebanon before COVID, with different representations in mind). Located in different neighbourhoud, tracing a wide diversity of situations and personalities, some of the characters seem to fight to get out of time. Even when they are abroad - in North or South America - it is the smell of death they cannot get rid of. They are not talking about death from the comfort of a café house facing the beauty of Mediterranean sea on a sunny day. Death is a palpable feeling, as are the butterflies courting the jacaranda trees. From a second to another, fragments of detonated flesh can just blow up against the beautiful blue sky. Death is out of the philosophical question, is as real as a flu or brushing your teeth. 

There is also a before and an after, but the clear description of the tragedy is needed. There is no end in sight for the tragedies so, reader, be aware to make your homeworks in reading about the catastrophy one is actually writing about.

With such a high human stake, it´s natural that not all stories are equal because there is a sense of emergency which pushes forward the writing and not everyone can successfully face the challenge. I also felt that the book is not finished, that there is much more left to be said than already expressed through the stories. But, what´s for sure, is that once one reads this Beirut Noir - or listen to it, as I did, narrated by Elias Khalil - would develop a special empathy that this city deserves. Not the ´colonial´ kind of empathy of a condescending ´Westerner´ looking from high above to the poor people in the Middle East, but the deep, genuine human empathy that makes us all human beings, at least once in a while. The collection was curated by Iman Humaydan, among others, co-author of PEN Lebanon. 

A special not to the cover, a photography that says thousands of stories.

For me, it was my first ´Noir´ Series, but definitely not the last, as I do have a special edition coming up for review in the next weeks and can´t wait to share it soon...

Rating: 3.5 stars