Vacant Lot

Fiction. Translated from the French by Laird Hunt. Set in a city much like Beirut in the aftermath of bloody civil war, a former mercenary relates his fate and that of others of his kind after the peace. The world is rapidly healing itself--people getting back to their lives, the city being rebuilt. But he is unable to leave the site his crimes. Rohe's narrative is striking in its understatement: much of the work's power lies in what's unsaid, what's hinted and inferred. Sentences run on and on or stop short as if they've reached a dead end. Repetition is a kind of entrenchment, a being stuck, perhaps in the density of poetry.