Carnival

April 1, 2013
Beirut-born Hage’s third novel (after Cockroach) is a dreamlike pastiche of vignettes narrated by a cabdriver and set in the run up to the carnival in fictional Carnival city. Main character Fly is no ordinary cabbie. Fly was born in a circus to a father with a turban and a magic carpet and a trapeze-artist mother. Fly is a “fly,” the type of cab driver who hunts for business—unlike the “spiders,” who wait for fares to come to them. In his travels, Fly meets a city’s worth of characters, among them drunken tourists, immigrant cabdrivers, a lascivious taxi inspector, a radical leftist, an escaped lunatic, and crack-addicted prostitutes and their children. Hage’s style is unique, blending the fantastic, such as Fly’s masturbatory flights of historical fancy, with the real, including a bookish stripper and a rash of murders among the cabbies. Although the carnival itself makes only incidental appearances in the narrative, the novel’s language spins and dips like a Tilt-a-Whirl—“And she laughed and walked among the garden of books, and then we took off our fig leaves and made love in the corner, where verses from heaven touched our bare, cracked asses that hopped and bounced like invading horses in holy lands”—complementing the rambling tales.

April 1, 2013
But then, life's a carnival right? The carnival metaphor/cliche suits the novel well, for the people who populate Hage's world tend to be on the periphery--outsiders, loners, questioners and especially readers. Fly, the main character and narrator, was born to a mother who was a trapeze artist and a father who (literally? figuratively? symbolically?) flew a flying carpet; not exactly mainstream professions. (Fly further complicates his genealogical history by claiming to a friend that his mother was also "a weaver of ropes, who loved for dwarves to nibble on the backs of her knees.") Fly becomes a taxi driver and gets his name because he embodies one of two styles of drivers: the spiders, who stay in one place waiting for their fares, and the flies, who incessantly roam the streets on the prowl for passengers. As one might imagine, this puts Fly in contact with some of the less prepossessing elements in modern urban culture. Another professional problem Fly runs into is the taxi inspector, a woman who "molests" the drivers, and if they resist her advances, they find themselves hit with big fines. Two other outsiders, Otto and Aisha, befriend Fly and take him into their home, but after Aisha dies, Otto is in such deep grief that he enters a mental hospital, unwillingly, for treatment. He gets his revenge on his psychiatrist by having Fly "kidnap" him and forcing him to read a poem by Amiri Baraka (LeRoi Jones). Fly's most important relationship is with Mary, a woman who, unlike her abusive husband, loves books. Hage's characters, while not necessarily larger than life, are certainly weirder than life, and Hage writes about them with humor and affection.

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May 1, 2013
Fly is a taxi driver. By night, he maneuvers the labyrinth of his large city, conveying passengers to their desired destinations. Among them are immigrants, professors, magicians, and lovers. Some of them are regulars, like the generous drug dealer, the altruistic exotic dancer, and the prostitute mother, while others he meets only for the duration of a single drive. Once a child of the circus, Fly is no stranger to the anomalous, and he is both fascinated and disgusted by the stories of his passengers and the worlds in which they live. His only social contact is with his passengers and occasional visits with his political-activist friend, Otto, and his neighbor Mary. Theirs are the stories gathered by Fly and related here with dark, insightful humor, casting a spotlight on the dingy corners and the lost people of the inner city where he earns his living. Rich with imagery and told in a broken narrative that mimics the chaos of the city's carnival season, Hage's newest novel is an enthralling page-turner well worth the trip.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2013, American Library Association.)