Carnival - Hardcover

Hage, Rawi

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0241145953 ISBN 13: 9780241145951

Publisher: Hamish Hamilton, 2013

Synopsis

There are two types of taxi driver in the Carnival city - the spiders and the flies. The spiders sit and stew in their cars, waiting for the calls to come to them. But the flies are wanderers - they roam the streets, looking for the raised flags of hands.

Fly is a wanderer and from the seat of his taxi we see the world in all of its carnivalesque beauty and ugliness. We meet criminals, prostitutes, madmen, magicians and clowns of many kinds. We meet ordinary people going to extraordinary places, and revolutionaries just trying to find something to eat. With all of the beauty, truth, rage, and peripatetic storytelling that have made his first two novels international publishing sensations, Carnival gives us Rawi Hage at his searing best.

By turns outrageous, hilarious, sorrowful, and stirring, Carnival is a tour de force that will make all of life's passengers squirm in their comfortable, complacent backseats.

About this title

About the Author

Rawi Hage was born in Beirut, Lebanon, and lived through nine years of the Lebanese civil war during the 1970s and 1980s. He emigrated to Canada in 1992 and now lives in Montreal. His first novel, De Niro's Game, won the IMPAC Dublin Literary Award for the best English-language book published anywhere in the world in a given year, and has either won or been shortlisted for seven other major awards and prizes. Cockroach was the winner of the Paragraphe Hugh MacLennan Prize for Fiction and a finalist for the Governor General's Literary Awards. It was also shortlisted for the Rogers Writers' Trust Fiction Award and the Scotiabank Giller Prize.

Review

The novel's short scenes of decadence and desperation spray across the pages like buckshot - loud and scattered, but still penetrating * Time Out * Rich and often beautiful, brave, engrossing, intelligent, literate, funny and very human . . . I relished this novel - for its compassion, its lyricism and its great human spirit * Guardian * A diverse yet tautly constructed novel that is evidently the work of a master storyteller. A tremendous novel - both laugh-out-loud hilarious and full of pathos; deftly constructed, affectionate yet disconcerting, and utterly engaging * Daily Telegraph *

Edition details

• Publisher: Hamish Hamilton
• Publication date: 2013
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0241145953
• ISBN 13: 9780241145951
• Binding: Hardcover
• Number of pages: 289