Cockroach – A Novel - Softcover

Hage, Rawi

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0393337871 ISBN 13: 9780393337877

Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company, 2011

Synopsis

In Montreal's restless immigrant community, our unnamed narrator is living in despair. Forced to visit a therapist after a suicide attempt, he brings us back to his 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 he imagines himself to be a cockroach invading the lives of the privileged, but willfully blind, citizens who surround him. Cockroach is a carnivalesque, philosophical novel that weaves dark humor with an accusatory, satirical voice, spawning from the subsurface to challenge humanity and its downfall.

About this title

Review:

Evoking both Dostoyevsky's Notes from Underground and Kafka's 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.... readers will be fascinated both by the inner lives of the troubled characters and by the textured portrait of Montreal's immigrant community. -- Heather Paulson

There is something exhilarating about [Cockroach's] relentlessness. . . . The narrator is ambiguous, untrustworthy, sly, and filled with a despair both nasty and noisy; but he is also deeply wounded, oddly lovable, his voice both moving and manipulative. --Colm Toibin"

From the Back Cover:

Praise for Cockroach: "[A] dark and uncompromising vision. [Cockroach] offers a version of an emigre underground which is original, raw and brave."-Colm Toibin"A dark Dostoevskian fable, which lowers the reader into the sewers of immigrant Montreal to confront an underground world teeming with sex, crime and greedy insectoid life."-Hari Kunzru"Searing, affecting, misanthropic."-Mohsin Hamid"Most fiction writers are primarily either stylists or plotters, but Hage is clearly both. There's a slight jolting sensation as the narrative shifts gear from poetic to cinematic, with guns and knives and elaborately contrived set-ups replacing the earlier evocations of drains and flesh and wintry streets, but it's all managed with great brio and expertise."-James Lasdun, The Guardian

About this edition

• Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company
• Publication date: 2011
• ISBN 10: 0393337871
• ISBN 13: 9780393337877
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 320