FICTION

BEIRUT BLUES by Hanan al-Shaykh, translated from the Arabic by Catherine Cobham (Anchor: $21.95; 371 pp.) If the novel traditionally is a mirror to the world, “Beirut Blues” is a broken glass that reflects a shattered reality--Lebanon in the midst of its long-drawn-out civil war. The narrator, Asmahan, is a middle-aged woman of good family whose ancestral lands have been occupied by militias and drug lords, the orchards replaced by fields of cannabis and opium poppies. She can’t stand living in embattled Beirut but can’t bear to leave.

Hanan al-Shaykh (“Women of Sand and Myrrh,” “The Story of Zahra”) tells the story in a series of imaginary letters Asmahan writes to a woman friend who has emigrated to Europe, the former men in her life (including Naser, a revolutionary, and Simon, a combat photographer), her grandparents, the blues singer Billie Holiday, her native city and the war itself.

Asmahan is an architect who has never practiced her profession, an emancipated woman verging on spinsterhood. At first we don’t know what to think of her. Is she a war junkie, a dilettante, a snob? Al-Shaykh’s style is all detail and emotional nuance, with only scattered guideposts to a history that, for us, is more than a few Bosnias and Rwandas ago. “Beirut Blues” is an undeniably slow, if rich, read.

Things clear up, finally, when a family retainer-turned-gangster spirits Asmahan out of Beirut in a tank. Back with her grandparents (both vividly drawn) and old friends in the Bekaa Valley, she shows she can take decisive action--though, with al-Shaykh’s typical indirection, it happens offstage. When a new lover gives Asmahan a chance to leave Lebanon altogether, we learn what price she is willing to pay to maintain her makeshift life, her affectionate detachment, in a country where fanaticism is the norm.