Aleppo has essentially fallen. The images have been unignorable, calamitous: of residents wandering numbly through burning city streets; of parents sobbing over dead children; of the strong wheeling away the weak. On Tuesday, a United Nations official described the massacre of fleeing civilians as “a complete meltdown of humanity.” Residents have been tweeting out their goodbyes. Tens of thousands have already been displaced or perished.

A once-thriving metropolis of wealth, power and culture is now in ruins.

Khaled Khalifa writes about his native city with sensuality and an almost feral intensity in his new novel, “No Knives in the Kitchens of This City.” The book focuses on just one family, and it stops several years short of the Syrian civil war. But it offers a glimpse into how terrified and empty of hope the people of a city must be to rise up in revolt. The future offers them nothing. It is a castle of closed doors.

“A festival of veritable insanity and strange odors,” Mr. Khalifa writes, “Aleppo became a city given over to ceaseless fear, a city of retribution, whimpering under the appetites of the mukhabarat” — the secret police — “and the corrupt officials who were proficient only in loyalty.”

Convention requires that I recount something of the plot of “No Knives in the Kitchens of This City,” first published in Cairo in 2013. But no synopsis can give a sense of what reading this book is like. Mr. Khalifa’s story is episodic rather than linear; it is more about an atmosphere, both emotional and physical, than any defining event. The author, whom this newspaper has called “one of the rising stars of Arab fiction,” writes in lush, pungent prose, some of it overripe, like a fermented banana. But some of it is also beautiful.