Carnival - Hardcover

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0887842356 ISBN 13: 9780887842351

Synopsis

Winner of the Quebec Writers' Federation Hugh MacLennan Prize for Fiction and shortlisted for the Rogers Writers' Trust Fiction PrizeIn the Carnival city there are two types of taxi drivers -- the spiders and the flies. The spiders patiently sit in their cars and wait for the calls to come. But the flies are wanderers - they roam the streets, looking for the raised hands of passengers among life's perpetual flux. Fly is a wanderer and a knower. Raised in the circus, the son of a golden-haired trapeze artist and a flying carpet pilot from the East, he is destined to drift and observe. From his taxi we see the world in all its carnivalesque beauty and ugliness. We meet criminals, prostitutes, madmen, magicians, and clowns of many kinds. We meet ordinary people going to extraordinary places, and revolutionaries trying to live ordinary lives. Hunger and injustice claw at the city, and books provide the only true shelter. And when the Carnival starts, all limits dissolve, and a gunshot goes off . . .With all of the beauty, truth, rage, and peripatetic storytelling that have made Cockroach and De Niro's Game international publishing sensations, Carnival gives us Rawi Hage at his searing best. Alternately laughing at absurdity and crying out at oppression, by turns outrageous, hilarious, sorrowful, and stirring, Carnival is a tour de force that will make all of life's passengers squirm in their comfortable, complacent backseats.

About this title

Review

Rawi Hage is, quite simply, a brilliant writer...Carnival confirms Hage's status as a star in the literary firmament.

Imagine Camus rewriting Taxi Driver.

Rawi Hage is, quite simply, a brilliant writer Carnival confirms Hage s status as a star in the literary firmament. "

Imagine Camus rewriting Taxi Driver. "

Carnival is a rich and compelling read, a testament to a daring and talented novelist. "

Fly is a fine foil for Hage's funny and acerbic observations on everything from religious hypocrisy to aberrant sex all told with a linguistic virtuosity and lusty bravado that echo James Joyce and Henry Miller. Told in short vignettes, Carnival is the novel of a city defined not so much by its citizens as by the whirling chaos of those who are only wandering visitors. "

The protagonist of this dreamlike tale is a voracious reader by day and a taxi driver by night. The reader wants to buckle up and join him for the ride.

The things that make Rawi Hage a major literary talent include freshness, gut-wrenching lyricism, boldness, emotional restraint, intellectual depth, historical sense, political subversiveness and uncompromising compassion.

Carnival is a rich and compelling read, a testament to a daring and talented novelist.

Distinctive and poetic a tremendous novel--both laugh-out-loud hilarious and full of pathos; deftly constructed, affectionate yet disconcerting, and utterly engaging.--Andrew Marszal"

Distinctive and poetic...a tremendous novel--both laugh-out-loud hilarious and full of pathos; deftly constructed, affectionate yet disconcerting, and utterly engaging.--Andrew Marszal

About the Author

Rawi Hage is a writer and visual artist. His two critically acclaimed novels, De Niro's Game and Cockroach, have been translated into twenty-nine languages. De Niro's Game was the winner of the International IMPAC Dublin Literary Award, and Cockroach was a finalist for the Scotiabank Giller Prize and for the Governor General's Literary Award. Born in Beirut, Hage lives in Montreal.

Edition details

• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0887842356
• ISBN 13: 9780887842351
• Binding: Hardcover