The Journey of Little Gandhi, Essay Example

Elias Khoury’s “The Journey of Little Gandhi” is a haunting tale set against the backdrop of the savagery of the Lebanese Civil War.  It is an unusually structured book, with the death of the protagonist, Little Gandhi, in the first chapter of the novel.  After his death, the reader learns about Little Gandhi –whose real name was Abd Al-Karim, a shoe-shiner in the war-ravaged city of Beirut – from Alice.  Alice is an aging prostitute who acts as a sort of Scherazade in this novel, spinning her thousand and one tales about Little Gandhi’s life and his death during the Israeli invasion of Beirut.

The novel sometimes can be a little difficult to follow, as it is complex and many stories are embedded in Alice’s narrative.  There is at times a haunting, other-worldly feel to it which has caused the novel to be compared to the “magic realism” literature of someone like Gabriel Garcia Marquez or Isabel Allende: “Alice said she took him to the cemetery, and she saw the people without faces…she spoke to them and didn’t get any response then she left and went on her way” (Khoury 7).  Adding to the complexity of the novel is the large cast of characters who weave their way in and out of the narrative.  And this is a story largely about the act of creating a narrative itself.  Like Scherazade, Alice is aware of both the power and the difficulty of a story well told: “I tell about it and I don’t quench my thirst and I go on my journey to it and do not find it: I find words that dangle like a rope, I climb the rope and I slip when I tumble to the ground, I see the walls collapse and the city migrate” (Khoury 191).

Though “The Journey of Little Gandhi” is a novel about the art of storytelling, it is also a novel of war, and the ravaged city forms a backdrop to the narrative that is so strong, the war almost becomes a character in and of itself.  This is a fresh and interesting take on a very old subject matter and one that is well worth the read.

Works Cited

Khoury, Elias. “The Journey of Little Gandhi”.  St. Paul: Regents of the University of Minnesota Press. 1994. 1-208. Print