Cockroach

Hage, Rawi

ISBN 10: 0887848346 / ISBN 13: 9780887848346

Published by House of Anansi Press, Toronto, 2008

About this Item

8vo, 305 pp.

Seller Inventory # 119848

Bibliographic Details

• Title: Cockroach
• Publisher: House of Anansi Press, Toronto
• Publication Date: 2008
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0887848346
• ISBN 13: 9780887848346
• Binding: softcover
• Edition: 1st.
• Condition: Fine copy
• Seller catalogs:
  • Fiction

About this title

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.

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"