Beirut, Beirutby Sonallah Ibrahimtranslated from the Arabic by Chip RossettiBloomsbury Qatar Foundation Publishing, 2015 One of the latest fruits of the partnership between Bloomsbury and Qatar Foundation Publishing is also one of the sweetest, a translation into wonderfully lively English by Chip Rossetti of Egyptian writer Sonallah Ibrahim's 1998 novel بيروت بيروت, Beirut, Beirut, a densely-packed novel set in November of 1980, at the heart of the fifteen-year Lebanese Civil War.The focus is an Egyptian “contractor,” a writer-for-hire, who flies in to Beirut despite its tension and chaos because, after all, a freelancer has to work. This particular writer has the manuscript of his latest book, a picaresque and vaguely scandalous tour of the Middle East, and he's bringing that manuscript to the offices of a Lebanese publisher who's agreed to produce it. Fresh from the airport he encounters an old friend who insists he take a spare room in his apartment rather than a hotel – and they're no sooner there than they learn from the news that his publisher's office as been bombed (by whom? The possible suspects are practically limitless: “You've got the Iraqis, the Syrians, the Jordanians, the Shia, the Israelis and the Libyans, etc, etc.”). The publisher himself, Adnan al-Sabbagh, wasn't in Lebanon at the time of the explosion, but even so, our freelancer and his friend immediately assume the deal is off and proceed to walk his manuscript to other publishers in town, all of whom are wittily caricatured schemers and thieves (there's a thread of mordant wit running through Beirut, Beirut, though it's often buried deep under the narrative's grimmer tidings).After a day of such efforts, warily passing potentially booby-trapped parked cars, walking past buildings wear gunfire-pocked competing posters of Saddam Hussein, Muammar Gaddafi, Yasser Arafat, and Ayatollah Khomeini, they try to relax in the apartment, but the Egyptian writer's old friend is never quite at home in his own home, which is full of unpleasant reminders of the unrest all around it. He recalls one typical moment to his friend:

“Can you imagine that two seconds were all that came between me and death? I was standing here, just the way you are now. It occurred to me to make a phone call, so I left the room. At that moment I heard the sound of glass shattering, and of something moving violently in the room and striking the wall. After that, I stumbled onto what was left of a rocket missile.”

While the fate of the writer's manuscript is up in the air, he needs work to supplement his meager funds while he's waiting in Beirut (he skimps on cheap drinks on the plane flight, but, typical of bookish people everywhere, he buys books – most of them pirated – from sidewalk stalls without hesitation). He takes a job writing the voiceover narration for a documentary about the war, even though, as he protests, he's not Lebanese. And while he's working on that project, he meets Lamia Sabbagh, the alluring wife of his would-be publisher, who complicates his already-complicated stay in the war-torn city.While he's researching that war, he frequently reflects on his own troubled homeland, which gives Ibrahim several opportunities for the kinds of knowing, cutting commentary about Egyptian politics and society for which he's become legendary. Even the gentlest of these rebukes speaks volumes about the attitudes of the beleaguered intelligentsia at the time:

Every morning, an Egyptian is flung about into several hundred pieces and he is unable to put himself back together again in the evening. Even national dignity no longer means anything to them. But what do you expect? Nasser killed off in them any capacity for working for a common cause.

Ibrahim first rose to literary fame for his slim 1966 masterpiece That Smell, and Beirut, Beirut finds him at the height of his powers as both a novelist and a journalist, incorporating large amounts of passionately-constructed history with very human stories of his well-drawn characters. This is an author Western reading audiences should know better than they do, and there's no better introduction than this powerful, angry, cynical novel, here presented in a sturdy, stylish paperback from Bloomsbury.