KOOLAIDS - The Art of War - Softcover

Alameddine, Rabih

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0349110603 ISBN 13: 9780349110608

Publisher: Picador USA, 1998

Synopsis

Detailing the impact of the AIDS epidemic and the Lebanese civil war in Beirut on a circle of friends and family, "Koolaids" tells the stories of characters who can no longer love or think except in fragments of time, each of which goes off along its own trajectory and immediately disappears. Clips, quips, vignettes and hallucinations, tragic news reports and hilarious short plays, conversations with both the quick and the dead, all shine their combined lights to reveal the way we experience life today in this ambitious novel.

About this title

From the Publisher

Rabih Alameddine's "Koolaids is the companion guide to The Tibetan Book of the Dead, The Diary of Anne Frank, and the history of the world. It is hysterical in both senses, hilarious and loudly disturbing. (Where else does Krishnamurti meet Eleanor Roosevelt and Tom Cruise?) Like Zen koans, Koolaids issues pronouncements while pointing out the absurdities of any kind of truth. It contemplates the meaning of death while redefining the meaninglessness of life. It looks at the great cycle of history, destiny, and literature and puts them on spin and recycle. This is an absolutely brilliant book - daring in its somersault of literary feats and allusions, an antidote for anyone who suffers from the blahs or an excess of self-satisfaction. I hope it's widely read. Just think of the fascinating dinner conversations and epitaphs it could spawn. I think Kant, Jung, and Borges would approve." --Amy Tan

"Alameddine is a respected painter who brings great visual skill to his first literary work. The novel is really an effectively conceived collage of the viewpoints of several characters. ...War, death, sex in a morally empty and meaningless world--when mixed on Alameddine's palette, they make for fascinating reading." --Library Journal

"[T]he AIDS epidemic in America, and the Lebanese civil war, are combined here by debut novelist Alameddine into a provocative, emotionally searing series of connected vignettes ...For a nonlinear novel the images chosen retain a remarkable cohesion. Often sexually frank or jarringly violent, they merge into a graphic portrait of two cultures torn from the inside." --Publishers Weekly

"[A] refreshing statement of honesty and endurance ...funny, brave full of heart and willing to say things about war and disease, sexual and cultural politics that have rarely been said so boldly or directly before." --The Sunday Oregonian

"Koolaids is a wildly imaginative tour de force--impressive, stunning. Alameddine's is the authentic voice of the prophet, speaking from the man-made wilderness of the twentieth century. Like all great prophets, he speaks with equal parts anger and love. Dark and funny and despairing and literate, and finally, in its unvarnished truth, affirming: 'Amid all the craziness, I am here. We are here.'" --Fenton Johnson, author of Scissors, Paper, Rock and Geography of the Heart: A Memoir

"This is a fantastic novel that every American should read. In an era in which the most conventional yuppie fiction rooted in suburban angst is being passed off as the New American Literature, Alameddine shows how formal invention can derive organically from the emotions of the experiences at stake, and not glib device. Koolaids communicates with crystal clarity because the content reflects the need for justice. This is the kind of writing that can transform American culture." --Sarah Shulman, author of Rat Bohemia, Girls, Visions and Everything and Empathy

About the Author

Rabih Alameddine is the author of the novels An Unnecessary Woman; I, the Divine; The Hakawati; and the story collection The Perv.

Edition details

• Publisher: Picador USA
• Publication date: 1998
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0349110603
• ISBN 13: 9780349110608
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 251