Cockroach
Rawi Hage, 2009
W.W. Norton & Co.
320 pp.
ISBN-13: 9780393337877
Summary
One of the most highly anticipated novels of the year, Cockroach is as urgent, unsettling, and brilliant as Rawi Hage’s critically acclaimed first book, De Niro’s Game.
The novel takes place during one month of a bitterly cold winter in Montreal’s 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 naïve therapist.
This sets the story in motion, leading us back to the narrator’s violent 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 the thief survives on the edge, imagining himself to be a cockroach invading the lives of the privileged, but willfully blind, citizens who surround him.
Cockroach combines an uncompromising vision of humanity with razor-sharp portraits of society's outsiders, and a startling, poetic sensibility with bracing jolts of dark humor. (From the publisher.)
Author Bio
• Birth—1964
• Where—Beirut, Lebanon
• Raised—Lebanon and Cyprus
• Education—Dawson College; Concordia University (Montreal)
• Awards—Paraqgraphe Huge MacLennan Prize; McAuslan First
Book Prize; Prix des Libraires du Quebec; IMPAC Dublin
Literary Award
• Currently—lives in Montreal, Canada
Rawi Hage was born in Beirut, Lebanon, and lived through nine years of the Lebanese civil war. He immigrated to Canada in 1992.
He is a writer, a visual artist, and a curator. His writings have appeared in Fuse Magazine, Mizna, Jouvert, the Toronto Review, Montreal Serai, and Al-Jadid. His visual works have been shown in galleries and museums around the world including the Canadian Museum of Civilization and the Musée de la civilisation de Québec.
Rawi's debut novel, De Niro's Game (2006), was a finalist for numerous prestigious national and international awards, and rights to the book have been sold around the world. (From the publisher and Wikipedia.)
Book Reviews
Hage's look at the underbelly of organized religion and immigrant life in Canada is unflinching and grim; what's even more remarkable is that he has transformed that material into a page-turner. Cockroach's finely wrought scenes build in tension toward a conclusion that's fitting and yet unpredictable... Readers are bound to be seduced.
Kevin Chong - CBC
Hage has done it again. He has produced an amazingly original and brilliant novel that shows he is no one-hit wonder, but a major force in Canadian literature.
Ottawa Citizen
The things that make Rawi Hage a major literary talent—and Cockroach as essential reading as its predecessor [De Niro's Game]—include freshness, gut-wrenching lyricism, boldness, emotional restraint, intellectual depth, historical sense, political subversiveness and uncompromising compassion.
Globe and Mail (Canada)
Cockroach echoes Hage's trademark concern for life's losers, for the dispossessed, the troubled and the despairing.... In a novel laced with dark humour and scorn for the complacency toward suffering in contemporary society, Hage dissects the immigrant experience with incisiveness and a good degree of aplomb.
London Free Press (Ontario)
[A] tour de force novel of fearsome wit, skilled prose, and impressive imagination... A beautiful, compelling, original work, one of the finest novels this year.
Edmonton Journal
Cockroach is a literary achievement of the best kind: it's imaginative and musical, psychologically layered and page-by-page suspenseful, about a character whose position we can all appreciate, though we'd rather not be there ourselves, on the edge of oblivion. Along with the best of the lowlife masterpieces—Hunger, The Outsider, Nadja, Notes from Underground, we now have Cockroach.
Quebec Writers' Federation - Hugh MacLennan Prize Jury
With a surprising degree of humor, Hage's second novel 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.
Publishers Weekly
A disturbed Arab immigrant in Montreal tries to insinuate himself into a strange new world. Hope and survival are not the same thing, indeed can often be mutually exclusive, Hage (De Niro's Game, 2007) demonstrates. The nameless narrator has landed in Quebec with little more than memories of his sister's murder to keep him company. In the wake of a failed suicide attempt (a jogger spotted him hanging from a tree and called the park police), he's thieving his way through an outlandish netherworld of immigrants like himself trying to make it by hook or by crook. The struggle has stripped away much of his humanity. "The underground, my friend, is a world of its own," he declares. "Other humans gaze at the sky, but I say unto you, the only way through the world is to pass through the underground." Wrath against his fellow man is largely undiminished by his tenuous subterranean connections, but he holds his temper for the two women in his life: Genevieve, his psychologist, and Shoreh, an Iranian waitress who shares his bed. Hage's certainly unreliable, possible deranged narrator is only the most noticeably unsettling ingredient in a stew of stylistic experimentation that emulates not only the tangled threads of immigrant fiction but also the dystopian visions of Kafka and Burroughs. (The protagonist imagines himself an insect and occasionally converses with a six-foot albino cockroach.) If the novel has a drawback, it's that Hage can't quite commit to the strangeness of his story, hastily tying up loose ends with a more conventional plotline involving Shoreh's torturers reemerging from the past. Messy but sophisticated, odd and decidedly interesting.
Kirkus Reviews
Discussion Questions
1. The main character says, "I am drawn to dark places like a suicidal moth to artificial lights." What does he mean by this statement?
2. Besides the obvious one of the main character turning into an insect, do you see any parallels between Kafka's The Metamorphosis and Cockroach?
3. Genevieve, the therapist, tries to chide the main character into co-operating with her saying she has a responsibility to the taxpayers. How does she approach her responsibility to her patient?
4. The main character says: "As a kid, I was fascinated by drains. I'm not sure if it was the smell, or the noises and echoes that were unexpectedly released after the water was gobbled, or if it was simply the possibility of escape to a place where the refuse of stained faces, infamous hands, dirty feet, and deep purple gums gathered in a large pool for slum kids to swim, splash, and play in." What childhood preoccupations are still with you as an adult?
5. The main character is without many of the ordinary items that we take for granted—soap, toilet paper, socks, shoes, food, warm clothing. Which descriptions or aspects of the main character's life shocked you the most?
6. Which aspects of Hage's writing engage you the most? Why?
7. "Primitive and uneducated as I was, I instinctively felt trapped in the cruel and insane world saturated with humans. I loathed grown-ups who were always hovering above me and looking down on me. They, of course, ruled the heights.... But I was the master of the underground." What aspects of the main character's upbringing do you think made him identify most with a cockroach? What advantages does this identification bring him?
8. Only cockroaches shall inherit the earth, according to the main character. What relationship does he have with God or religion?
9. What parts do the minor characters play in the novel? Lebanon: Souad (sister), Rima (sister's friend); Montreal: Genevieve (therapist), Sylvie and friends (rich), Shohreh Sherazy (lover), the Professor, Sehar (boss's daughter), the Pakistani family downstairs, the landlord, his Russian wife, and the old lady she steals from, Reza the musician, Farhoud, Majeed (Shohreh's uncle's friend), and Mr. Shaheed (the torturer).
10. How does the main character express his contempt for middle class Canadians, poor immigrants, formerly rich immigrants, the Professor, his therapist, and a good many of the people with whom he interacts? Is there anyone or anything that escapes his righteous indignation? If so, why?
11. What does the main character mean when he says: "Impotent, infertile filth!... Your days are over and your kind is numbered. No one can escape the sun on their faces and no one can barricade against the powerful, fleeting semen of the hungry and the oppressed."
12. The main character says, "It is my greed that I regret. Humans are creatures of greed." In what ways is he greedy?
13. "I am just doing it for history's sake," says the main character as he helps the landlord's wife steal from the old lady. How do his actions benefit history?
14.) What does the main character gain from his relationships with Shohreh and Genevieve? Do either of them offer him healing or redemption? If so, how?
(Questions issued by publisher.)
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