Cockroach - Softcover

Hage, Rawi

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0887848346 ISBN 13: 9780887848346

Publisher: House of Anansi Pr, 2009

Synopsis

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 emigre cafes 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.

About this title

Review

Evoking both Dostoyevsky's Notes from Underground and Kafka's 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 Montreal's immigrant community. -- Heather Paulson

There is something exhilarating about [Cockroach's] relentlessness. . . . The narrator is ambiguous, untrustworthy, sly, and filled with a despair both nasty and noisy; but he is also deeply wounded, oddly lovable, his voice both moving and manipulative. --Colm Toibin"

From the Back Cover

Praise for Cockroach: "[A] dark and uncompromising vision. [Cockroach] offers a version of an emigre 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

Edition details

• Publisher: House of Anansi Pr
• Publication date: 2009
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0887848346
• ISBN 13: 9780887848346
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 305