A House at the Edge of Tears

By Vénus Khoury-Ghata

In the city of Beirut, five shabby dwellings circle a courtyard with a pomegranate tree weeping blood red fruit. The residents hear screams in the night as a boy is tossed out into the street by his father--a punishment for masturbating in his sleep. A crime not worthy of the punishment: the neighbors gossip and decide that he must have tried to rape his sisters. "Small-boned with long, silky lashes, no one but the devil could camouflage evil so seductively." The poems he writes are perhaps an even greater crime to his father, but ultimately a gift to his eldest sister, who narrates their story with a combination of brutal truth and stunning prose. As her brother becomes more and more lost to his family and to himself, we also learn of a Contessa who teaches tango, a family who spends every Sunday in search of buried treasure, and the miracle of a weeping Madonna statue that cries when human tears run dry. In the harrowing and mesmerizing novel A House at the Edge of Tears , celebrated novelist and poet, Khoury-Ghata, presents the disintegration of a family and a country--both ruled by a fury fueled by fear.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 1555974341
• ISBN13: 9781555974343
• Release Date: November 2005
• Publisher: Graywolf Press
• Length: 111 Pages
• Weight: 0.35 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.4" x 5.3" x 8.5"

Customer Reviews

Hauntingly Beautiful

"The same wind that comes from the sea has run down the same streets for forty years. The rain that used to drench the buildings crossed a field of ruins. At the two extremities of this field: a house where my father conducted a reign of terror and a grave where he found a place not meant for him. He was buried there by chance. War had scrambled the country's geography: the dead were given up to the closest cemetery. ... ... I exhume two of my dead and one living-dead: my brother who concentrated within himself all of his father's ambitions and fury; I want to question them, open their mouths sealed in silence, to rout out by force the cause of those rages, as brutal and brief as resin-fires. In a northern village, the tomb of a Maronite saint has been sweating blood for a century. My father's grave oozes threats from its stony pores. My mother's, modest and moss-covered, seeps tears. My mother had only tears to defend her son. "God, let him be dead!" I would repeat until I was near fainting when my father was late coming home. I dreamed about being an orphan. Only his death would stop my mother's tears, my brother's cries of terror, and we three girls from trembling." ...So begins Venus Khoury-Ghata's book, A House at the Edge of Tears - published by Greywolf Press, 2005. After reading the first four pages, I was left feeling as if my very being had been churned, tossed, and spit out - not so much horrified by the brutality but disturbed but at the same time in awe of the immense effect mere words, conjoined into haunting sentences, had effected - bringing home images of a brutality and a grief that one couldn't imagine, let alone empathize with. Joyce Carol Oates wrote in her introduction to The Best American Essays of the Century - "My belief is that art should not be comforting. For comfort, we have mass entertainment and one another. Art should provoke, disturb, arouse our emotions, expand our sympathies in directions we may not anticipate and may not even wish." By that measure, Venus Khoury-Ghata has written a veritable piece of art. Most novels, in my opinion, lose a lot in translation but if that is the case here, the talent of Khoury-Ghata can only then amaze one even more. Marilyn Hacker, herself a poet and author of some repute, has brought us English readers a genuinely amazing read - so much so, I am tempted to go and immediately read Khoury-Ghata's award winning book of poems, She Says, also translated by Hacker. Without giving away too much of the story here or having to reproduce the entire four pages or the entire book, for that matter, suffice it is to say that the book takes us along on a relentless, brutal, and hauntingly poignant journey, without ever stooping to self-pity or self-indulgent sensationalism. The author, a Lebanese poet and novelist, resident in France since 1973, narrates the story of her childhood in Beirut forty years ago - throwing `sentences on the page in great shovelfuls, with a noise of falli