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