Cockroach

Starred review from June 29, 2009
With a surprising degree of humor, Hage's second novel (after IMPAC Dublin-winner DeNiro's Game
) 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.

September 1, 2009
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.

(COPYRIGHT (2009) KIRKUS REVIEWS/NIELSEN BUSINESS MEDIA, INC. ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.)

September 1, 2009
Set in wintry Montreal, Hages novel sheds light on the citys complex Middle Eastern immigrant community and its struggle for survival. After a failed suicide attempt, our narrator must undergo state-sponsored therapy sessions, where he is forced to confront his disturbing past. Meanwhile, he falls in love with a beautiful but tormented Iranian woman and trieswith little successto hold down a job and forge a normal life. As a self-proclaimed thief, the narrator is both man and cockroach, transforming into bug form in order to trespass into homes and spy on the secrets of others. Evoking both Dostoyevskys Notes from Underground and Kafkas 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. Although Hage leaves much unexplained, readers will be fascinated both by the inner lives of the troubled characters and by the textured portrait of Montreals immigrant community.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2009, American Library Association.)