Carnival
-
-
3.0 • 1 Rating
-
-
- £1.99
-
- £1.99
Publisher Description
Carnival is a new novel from IMPAC Literary Award winner Rawi Hage.
WINNER OF THE PARAGRAPHE HUGH MACLENNAN PRIZE FOR FICTION
There are two types of taxi driver in the Carnival city - the spiders and the flies. The spiders sit and stew in their cars, waiting for the calls to come to them. But the flies are wanderers - they roam the streets, looking for the raised flags of hands.
Fly is a wanderer and from the seat of his taxi we see the world in all of 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 just trying to find something to eat. With all of the beauty, truth, rage, and peripatetic storytelling that have made his first two novels international publishing sensations, Carnival gives us Rawi Hage at his searing best.
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.
Praise for Rawi Hage:
'A large and unsettling talent' Guardian
'Searing, affecting, misanthropic. I'm not from Lebanon and I don't live in Canada, but Cockroach managed to take me to where I come from and where I live now more powerfully than anything I've read in a long while' Mohsin Hamid
'The best novel I read this year was Rawi Hage's Cockroach. A dark book, narrated with verve and brilliance. It made me jump for joy' Colm Tóibín, Guardian
Rawi Hage was born in Beirut, Lebanon, and lived through nine years of the Lebanese civil war during the 1970s and 1980s. He emigrated to Canada in 1992 and now lives in Montreal. His first novel, De Niro's Game, won the IMPAC Dublin Literary Award for the best English-language book published anywhere in the world in a given year, and has either won or been shortlisted for seven other major awards and prizes. Cockroach was the winner of the Paragraphe Hugh MacLennan Prize for Fiction and a finalist for the Governor General's Literary Awards. It was also shortlisted for the Rogers Writers' Trust Fiction Award and the Scotiabank Giller Prize.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
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.
