Cockroach (CA)

From Publishers Weekly Starred Review. With a surprising degree of humor, Hage's second novel (after IMPAC Dublin-winner DeNiro's Game ) explores the peculiar politics of Montreal's immigrant communities through the bleak obsessions of a misanthropic thief. After trying and failing to kill himself, an unnamed narrator who believes himself to be part cockroach is compelled to attend counseling sessions with an earnest and alluring therapist. As he unspools his personal history—from his apprenticeship with the thief Abou-Roro to the tragic miscalculation that led him to flee his home country—the narrator, reluctant to tell his story (we never learn where the narrator is from, and inconsistencies in his tale cast doubt upon his honesty), scuttles through the stories of others, recounting secrets both confidentially shared and invasively discovered. Unable to support himself on burglary alone, the narrator takes a job as a busboy, but runs into complications after discovering his lover's connection to the restaurant's most prominent customer. The novel's gritty back-alley world gives rise to a host of glorious rogues, each swindling the others at every opportunity, and yet each is capable of great empathy under just the right circumstances. (Oct.) Copyright В© Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved. Review “Evoking both DostoyevskyвЂTMs Notes from Underground and KafkaвЂTMs Metamorphosis , this magic-realist novel set in modern times brings to light, out of the darkness of a Canadian winter, the war-torn and violent past of its characters.... readers will be fascinated both by the inner lives of the troubled characters and by the textured portrait of MontrealвЂTMs immigrant community.” During a bitterly cold winter in a snowy northern city, a self-confessed thief has just tried to commit suicide by hanging himself from a tree in the local park. Rescued against his will and obliged to attend sessions with a well-meaning but naive therapist, our narrator tells her – and us – his heartrending and hallucinatory story.From his childhood in a war-torn Arab country, to his current life in the smoky emigre cafes of his new city, Cockroach traces our narrator's journey – his longing for a place in the world, his guilt over his sister's death at the hands of her husband, and his love for an Iranian woman, Shoreh, whose life is also a flight from the darkness of the past. As the stories in this remarkable book converge, our narrator must confront the events of the past in the form of another moral but potentially murderous dilemma in the present . . . Praise for Cockroach:

“[A] dark and uncompromising vision. [Cockroach] offers a version of an émigré underground which is original, raw and brave.”—Colm Toibin

“A dark Dostoevskian fable, which lowers the reader into the sewers of immigrant Montreal to confront an underground world teeming with sex, crime and greedy insectoid life.”—Hari Kunzru

“Searing, affecting, misanthropic.”—Mohsin Hamid

“Most fiction writers are primarily either stylists or plotters, but Hage is clearly both. There’s a slight jolting sensation as the narrative shifts gear from poetic to cinematic, with guns and knives and elaborately contrived set-ups replacing the earlier evocations of drains and flesh and wintry streets, but it’s all managed with great brio and expertise.”—James Lasdun, The Guardian

"Funny and sharp . . . playful and erotic."―New York Times Book Review In Montreal's restless immigrant community, our unnamed narrator is living in despair. Forced to visit a therapist after a suicide attempt, he brings us back to his childhood in a war-torn country, forward into his current life in the smoky émigré cafés where everyone has a tale, and out into the frozen nighttime streets of Montreal, where he imagines himself to be a cockroach invading the lives of the privileged, but willfully blind, citizens who surround him. Cockroach is a carnivalesque, philosophical novel that weaves dark humor with an accusatory, satirical voice, spawning from the subsurface to challenge humanity and its downfall. Cockroach takes place during one month of a bitterly cold winter in Montreals restless immigrant community, where a self-described thief has just tried but failed to commit suicide by hanging himself from a tree in a local park. Rescued against his will, the narrator is obliged to attend sessions with a well-intentioned but nave therapist. This sets the story in motion, leading us back to the narrators violent childhood in a war-torn country, forward into his current life in the smoky migr cafs, and out into the frozen nighttime streets of Montreal. Bold, haunting, and emotionally trenchant, Cockroach is a powerful story of immigrant experience, indignation, and unrelenting fortitude. A tale set during a month in a bitter Montreal winter finds a would-be thief rescued from a suicide attempt and forced into counseling with a naïve therapist to whom he relates his childhood in a war-torn country and his troubled present life in a series of smoky émigré cafes