Village boy turned Marxist, undone by war
A narrator raised in a clan-bound Maronite village in northern Lebanon moves to Beirut and converts to Marxism, believing it will dissolve sect, family and village loyalty into a universal politics of class. The civil war instead sorts people back into sects and clans, and the ideology gives him no shelter. Convinced he is dying, he writes his life's reckoning as letters to Yasunari Kawabata, a Japanese novelist already dead, because no one closer can receive it.