Cockroach

Rawi Hage

ISBN 10: 0887842097 / ISBN 13: 9780887842092

Published by House of Anansi Pr, 2008

Former library book; May have limited writing in cover pages. Pages are unmarked. ~ ThriftBooks: Read More, Spend Less. Seller Inventory # G0887842097I4N10

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.

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"

Bibliographic Details

Title: Cockroach
Publisher: House of Anansi Pr
Publication Date: 2008
Binding: Hardcover
Condition: Very Good
Dust Jacket Condition: No Jacket