The Angel of History

August 8, 2016
Alameddine’s novel (following National Book Award–finalist An Unnecessary Woman) is the inner monologue of Jacob, a poet in crisis, as he checks himself into a mental institution for a long weekend, leaving his beloved cat, Behemoth, in the care of a friend. Jacob was born in Yemen to a Lebanese father and Yemeni mother, raised in a Cairo brothel, educated by French Catholics, and lived as a gay Arab expatriate in San Francisco at the height of the AIDS epidemic—an American who insists he doesn’t “do Middle East conversations” and loathes the “poetry of nostalgia” but in whom the complicated experience of migration reverberates. Now interrogated by the specters of Satan and Death, who bring a host of saints to testify on Jacob’s behalf, he spills his history—the lovers who have come before, and his initiation in the queer subculture, maturation as a poet, and deep engagement with literature—until it intersects with global history: the rise of al-Qaeda and wars political and personal, all playing out while Jacob sits in a hospital waiting room, wondering if he’ll ever be called in. It’s not really his sanity, but his identity as a poet, an Arab, and a gay man that hangs in the balance. The novel takes a nonlinear approach that is occasionally messy, but Alameddine brilliantly captures Jacob’s mind as it leaps between memory and the present. Agent: Nicole Aragi, Aragi Inc.

July 15, 2016
A poet reckons with emotional stability after his lover's death, with a few cameos from the spiritual world.Jacob, like many characters in Alameddine's oeuvre (An Unnecessary Woman, 2014, etc.), is highly literate, Middle Eastern, gay, and tormented: as the story opens, he's checking himself into a San Francisco psychiatric clinic because he's "having hallucinations, hearing Satan's voice again." News of another drone strike in his mother's native Yemen hasn't helped his sanity, but his central despair is the inability to shake the loss of his friends and partner during the height of the AIDS crisis. The novel's fractured narrative captures the variety of coping mechanisms Jacob has tried: he recalls visits to S&M dungeons, delivers irreverent and satirical rants about politics and culture ("if I hear one more stanza eulogizing the scent of orange blossoms in Palestine, I will buy a gun, I swear"), and recalls his peripatetic childhood separated from his parents. Alameddine adds a mystical layer to these memories in sections where Satan (presumably a projection of Jacob's anxieties) holds court with Death and various saints to prod Jacob to continue his self-loathing. As in An Unnecessary Woman, Alameddine is excellent at weaving literary references into his storytelling, and his set pieces have a sardonic cast that captures Jacob's struggle to make sense of a world overflowing with HIV and innocent war victims; one digression is an extended boy-meets-drone fable. That said, the novel's continuous shifts into different rhetorical gears risk making the novel feel almost centerless, or at least distant from the core story of Jacob's stint in the clinic. Nobody could reasonably recommend that Alameddine restrict his limber imagination, but his swoops from dour to catty to fablelike to earthbound can be jarring. A feverish portrait of a mind in crisis, echoed in some overly fragmented storytelling.

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Starred review from July 1, 2016
Craving respite from memory and the voice of Satan in his head, a gay Arab poet in San Francisco seeks refuge as his story spills out. Born of a Lebanese father and Yemeni mother, Jacob (the bastardization of Ya'qub) spent his childhood in a Cairo brothel where his mother worked; then he was sent to his wealthy father in Beirut and on to a Catholic boarding school, where he was harassed by students and seduced by a nun. But his most painful memories were of the deaths of the men closest to him, including his physician lover, in the age of AIDS, the disease that somehow spared him. The narrative moves between one day in Jacob's life, his journals and stories, and Satan's sly, witty interviews with Death and with the 14 saints who attend Jacob throughout his life. As his literary powers abated, Jacob wrote fiction rather than poetry, and three examples starkly illustrate the ongoing conflict in the Middle East and the sand nigger status of Arabs in the Western world. In this provocative portrait of a man in crisis, masterful storyteller Alameddine (An Unnecessary Woman, 2014) takes on some of the most wrenching conflicts of the day.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2016, American Library Association.)

May 15, 2016

This darkly funny follow-up to An Unnecessary Woman, named a National Book Award and a National Book Critics Circle Award finalist and a best book by over half a dozen venues, features the Yemeni-born Jacob, who wrestles with Satan and Death itself in the waiting room of a psychiatric clinic. Raised first by his mother in an Egyptian whorehouse and then by his gilded father, Jacob is a poet who came of age as a gay Arab man in AIDS-ravaged San Francisco. A seductive Satan keeps reminding Jacob of past sorrows, while Death insists he has no reason to keep living. At least Jacob has 14 saints on his side. With a ten-city tour.

Copyright 2016 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

Starred review from August 1, 2016

How does the mind grapple with transition, change, loneliness, and deterioration? Alameddine's (An Unnecessary Woman; I, the Divine) body of work is an extended meditation on this central question. Though set in a psychiatric clinic waiting room, the novel delves into the structural and temporal landscape of Jacob's mind. The Yemen-born protagonist scavenges through the disparate memories of his transient life, from Beirut to San Francisco. His life is a constant struggle for acceptance and stability from a distant mother, an absent father, and a string of emotionally unavailable partners. Grieving the recent death of his boyfriend, Jacob is adrift in a blur of sadness, depression, and suicidal tendencies. Accompanying him on this retrospection are Satan, Death, and various saints, all vying to control the narrative of Jacob's past, present, and future. This colorful cast of characters simultaneously challenges and encourages his mutinous path toward a final solution. VERDICT With humor and wit, Alameddine reconfigures the self in exile and all its implications. [See Prepub Alert, 4/25/16.]--Joshua Finnell, Los Alamos National Lab., NM

Copyright 2016 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.