Customer Reviews

Cockroach: A Novel

5 star:		(7)
4 star:		(9)
3 star:		(9)
2 star:		(3)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

Rawi Hage's Cockroach is an intriguing tale narrated by a more self-aware Gregor Samsa as he tries to navigate through the immigrant community in contemporary Montreal. He's a dark and twisted man--there is nothing light-hearted about this novel, but its bitter, black humor is compelling. The novel is not for the faint of heart--sex, drugs and violence (though none of it gratuitous) fill the pages. Kudos to Hage for drawing a bleak picture, while never giving us a bleak novel.

"Cockroach" is excellent and bears level amounts of tempering with noir, gee real literature, and easy readability for a good time. Follow this Canadian immigrant author RAWI HAGE and read everything he writes! "Cockroach" concerns a young male protagonist in exile from Iran who has come to make a new life and found a hard time of it in Montreal, Canada. The best he can do is get on the dole, and down into the vice and dope underworld, and end up waiting tables at a middle-Eastern restaurant. His scrimping for a few crumbs to eat is reminiscent of some of Henry Miller's work. This is a talented and gifted author on his way UP UP UP. Rawi Hage is the cat's pajamas: Please sir, one more!

Set in Montreal and narrated by an Arab immigrant, some readers might call "Cockroach" an allegory; one exposing the trials and lives of impoverished immigrants. In "Cockroach," the protagonist, like the hero of Kafka's "The Metamorphosis," takes on the form of an insect. In "Cockroach", however, the transformation is psychological rather than physical - the narrator envisions himself as the insect rather than actually becoming one. Further, no one other than the narrator sees him as an actual insect. However, the narrator might argue he is treated, by non-immigrants, in the same manner as other unwelcome vermin - reviled and avoided.

Moving between reality and his imaginary life as a cockroach, the narrator provides the reader brief glimpses into the lives of individuals with whom he interacts. Like the narrator, most are immigrants who struggle against poverty and a world they do not control. All carry burdens of their former lives; all are impacted by their past. Under psychiatric treatment because of attempted suicide, it is only during his sessions that the reader is given details of the narrator's life prior to immigration.

Rawi Hage uses vivid imagery to draw the reader into the immigrant's world, one of poverty and survival. The narrator lives in filth, like the cockroach; his apartment teams with real cockroaches, living in filth and surviving off the crumbs he scatters. The narrator also lives off crumbs; the crumbs he can scavenge from society whether these are his welfare payments or the ill-gotten gains of theft. It is during his most stressful moments that the narrator takes on the persona of the cockroach. His desperation is palpable. He continually compares himself and other immigrants to cockroaches, telling how, in the end, they will overrun the world and survive.

"Cockroach" is not an easy, light read; it is not fun or entertaining. "Cockroach" does require concentration and should be read with as few interruptions as possible. The novel has a definite psychological leaning; the writing is so vivid that it will propel the reader into its ugly world. Rawi Hage is a skilled wordsmith; as a result, the reader easily visualizes both individuals and their situations. The text contains some profanity and some graphic sexual scenarios and innuendo.

Although I did not particularly enjoy this work, I felt it deserved four stars since it is a very well written book. Had I not read "The Metamorphosis" in college, I probably would have upped the rating to five stars since I would have also viewed this book, in which an individual "becomes" an insect, as a very original piece.

Turning the last page of this book I felt like standing up, dusting myself off as best as possible, and heading for a long, hot, cleansing shower. The book was far more of a challenge than a pleasure. If Rawi Hage's down in the dirt novel, Cockroach, had been written poorly and/or was without merit, it would have been satisfying to use a blowtorch instead of a pen to write a review. Hage didn't give me that luxury: he knows how to write, and Cockroach is a work of both integrity and value.

The protagonist, more anti-hero than hero, is a nameless (occasionally referred to as "kid") member of that part of the Montreal immigrant community that hangs on by its economic finger nails. Told in the first person, our guide takes us on a gritty, grimy, insect-ridden, violence-prone, sexual, crime-laden tour of roughly one frozen winter month in the life of the members of this community. Our protagonist remains so anonymous, so sub-surface, so invisible, as he moves through this environment that his existence approximates (and in his own mind becomes) that of a cockroach. Even his therapist (assigned to our anti-hero compulsorily after his suicide attempt) doesn't address him by name, and his musician friend Reza sums up our anti-hero/cockroach's worth in this way: "I give something in return" (Reza continued) "while you are nothing but a petty thief with no talent. All you can do is make the fridge light go on and off, and once the door is closed you're never sure if the light inside has turned to darkness, like your own dim soul". And if that's how your friends think about you....

The reader will be tempted to react to our anti-hero's actions and viewpoints with disgust, condescension, and possibly anger. Be prepared for the fact that our protagonist's reaction to the comfortable, self-satisfied, shallow, hyper-precious life of the culturally pretentious is no less negative, and much more severe.

And yet, as difficult a read as it was for me, I found much more in Hage's writing than a simple counter-cultural rant, more than a morbid examination of the squalid, more than simple self-loathing. Strands of integrity, wisps of human feeling, threads of the ability to experience and give love, weave a potent ending to the tale of Cockroach.

Rawi Hage's book is an exploration of one part of Montreal's sociological crawl space. Crawl spaces are nasty. In my Central Oregon location, my rare descents into the crawl space beneath my house are unpleasant encounters with large spiders, the occasional scorpion, the skittering sound of sage rats running off, and scattered animal droppings. The dirt I crawl over as I dodge plumbing and floor beams is laced with volcanic rock that skins my knees even through my clothing. When I emerge, I'm covered with dirt, scratched up, and happy to be breathing clean air in the light of day. Emerging from the experience of reading Cockroach, I'm guessing that many readers will metaphorically feel the same way.

What fuels the rage that surfaces so frequently in this book? One passage suggests that Rawi Hage's survival of nine years of the Lebanese civil war is a source: "At the first sip of beer, the first fries, I forget and forgive humanity for its stupidity, its foulness, its avarice and greed, envy, lust gluttony, sloth, wrath, and anger. I forgive it for its contaminated spit, its valued feces, its rivers of piss, its bombs, all its bad dancing. I also forget about the bonny infants with the African flies clustering on their noses, the marching drunk soldiers on the way to whorehouses. I forget about my mother and my father, the lightless nights I spent with my sister playing cards, dressing up toy soldiers, and undressing dolls by candlelight, reading comics."

For a fascinating contrast to Hage's story, read Tracy Kidder's Strength in What Remains, the non-fiction account of a survivor of the Tutsi genocide who ends up scratching for survival in New York's own down and out immigrant community.

This book is not for light consumption, and not for book clubs that like their books high in entertainment and low on literary crawl spaces. Literary spelunkers, and those who enjoy the heights of human existence the more for having visited the depths: forge ahead.

I have a feeling this is one of those books that any individual reader will either love or hate. I wasn't sure which direction I was going with it, myself, until shortly before the end when I realized where the author was headed with his antihero. At which point I knew it was a keeper.

Unlike the adventure novels that I usually read, this is much more of a character study. The character in question is a petty thief with an unlovely past marred by war and more personal sorts of violence; he lands in Canada in circumstances that are never quite explained and proceeds to eke out a meager living there. He continues muddling along in the wake of a suicide attempt, until events force him to make one of those life-changing decisions that luckier people are forever able to avoid. His decision is correct but hardly redemptive, and in that sense doesn't deviate too much from the larger pattern of his life. You don't exactly feel sympathy for him--and still less will you feel sorry for him--but you just may end up respecting him. Mixed in with all this is, of course, explicit and implicit political and economic commentary. I find it congenial, but many won't.

I'd recommend that everyone give this book a try, at least. Whether you end up appreciating it or not, you'll probably learn something from it.

Rawi Hage's second novel COCKROACH is quite simply one of the best stories I have read in a long time. Set in Montreal, the novel covers one cold winter month in the life of an unnamed narrator, who has recently attempted suicide by hanging: "my rope incident." He now, as part of his punishment for failure, has to visit a therapist named Genevieve, whom he describes as simple, educated but "naive. . . sheltered by glaciers and prairies, thick forests, oceans and dancing seals." Genevieve in large part controls the narrator's future, as she constantly reminds him that he is costing the Canadian taxpayers money. He then becames a Scheherazage telling stories to keep the shrink from having him committed.

The narrator is a petty thief, stealing lipstick from his therapist's purse, chocolates from a Korean grocer, money from the wallets of women he sleeps with as well as toilet tissue from a cafe. A busboy in Star of Iran Restaurant, he sees himself as half cockroach-- "In my youth, I was an insect," [cockroach] he tells his shrink-- as he moves in the lower depths of Montreal's immigrant community.

COCKROACH is peopled with a gaggle of fascinating if motley characters: Reza, the Iranian musician who manages to "couch-surf in women's houses," Shohreh, a beautiful Iranian exile whom the narrator states in the first line of the novel he is in love with, her friend, the exotic Farhoud, another Iranian who looks Chinese and has a "Mongolian spot" on his buttocks, Professor Youssef, the pseudo-French intellectual who asks existential questions but like the narrator, receives welfare. Additionally there are the narrator's family members whom he calls up for his shrink; Jehovah's Witnesses wander in and out of his narrative as well-- and of course the cockroaches. He muses: "Could it be that the cockroaches saw me throwing my rope over the tree in the park, and rushed to cut that branch above me?"

Since Mr. Hage was born in Beirut, Lebanon-- although he now lives in Canada-- I assume that English is not his first language although you would not know that from his beautiful sentences. You can pick practically any paragraph on any page and be awed by the magic of his bleak words as he, piling metaphor upon metaphor, captures the bitter cold of a Montreal winter and a world of darkness: The narrator is "blowing breath onto my fingers like a cold God creating the world, rubbing my hands like a happy thief, sticking my neck into my shoulders like a turtle, sniffing like a junkie, shivering like a ghost, inquiring like a Spanish inquisitor dreaming of a flamenco dancer to warm my heart." Public phones in the cold stand "like vertical, transparent coffins for people to recite their lives in." "I took off my shoes, left them at the entrance to bleed snow." Finally, "The wind off the water was colder on the bank of the river. . . I wondered how I had ended up here. How absurd. How absurd. The question is, Where to end? All those who leave immigrate to better their lives, but I wanted to better my death. Maybe it is the ending tha matters, not the life, I thought. Maybe it is the ending that matters, not the life, I thought. Maybe we, like elephants, walk far towards our chosen burials."

A word about the ending: it will blow you out of the water.

Oh my! What a novel! What a narrator! I quite simply put off letting this novel end because I just knew whatever came next for me to read would be less than this wonderful. Oh, yes, and when you get to it, what an ending it is!
The novel is set in cold, cold Montreal where "menacing armies of heavy boots" encase people's feet. Wouldn't a cockroach see our feet that way even though the narrator isn't really a cockroach? But he most certainly is a human one!
The narrator is totally outside life in Montreal, a voyeur, and definitely a psychopathic one. (I think the two people who wrote the two-star reviews didn't realize that this narrator is indeed psychopathic. Big time!)
Born in Lebanon, he migrated to Montreal and for reasons we don't know for most of the novel, he has been released--unfortunately for many of his victims--from some type of institution. The release has been contingent upon his seeing a therapist named Genevieve.
In one scene he writes, "I like to pass by fancy stores and restaurants and watch the people behind thick glass, taking themselves seriously, driving forks into their mouths... I also like to watch the young waitresses in their short black dresses... Although I no longer stand and stare." And then he proceeds to tell what happened the prior summer when he did that, an episode that led to police being called in, and our cockroach narrator informs them that he was only looking at his own reflection in the glass. And then it seems he watched as the couple he was staring at left, the man opening from a distance with his remote the door to the BMW. And, yes, our narrator manages to get into the car without being seen, manages then to get into their house from the parked car in the garage, manages to see some elements of their getting ready for bed--his focus upon the woman--and then admits this: "At the couple's home I stole his gold ring, his cigarettes, a Roman vase, his tie..."
As he says about himself when he steals or plans his advances on women, "I was the insect beneath them."
I am so much in agreement with the reviewer who wrote this: "You can pick practically any paragraph on any page and be awed by the magic of his bleak words as he, piling metaphor upon metaphor, captures the bitter cold of a Montreal winter and a world of darkness.
This is one of the most amazing novels I have read in recent years. And I read as many as two novels a week.

Rawi Hage's second novel "Cockroach" is an absorbing story, told through the eyes of Lebanese immigrant living in Montreal. The unnamed narrator (fittingly unnamed as one would not name a cockroach) is the anti-hero of this tale of survival without hope, which takes place during a extremely harsh winter in Montreal, a city known more for beauty than the lowlife activity which occurs in this story. The narrator associates himself with cockroaches, an association that started with an innocent early childhood memory of playing with his sister, but that self-image evolves from that point to fit his current life and environment. There appears to be no escape from this frozen prison, as even his attempt at suicide fails to release him from his circumstances, though he doesn't appear to even consider escape as a goal.

Like a roach, the narrator scavenges for food, can find his way into anyplace (which makes him successful in stealing), and is looked down upon with disgust by most of the other characters in the book. Those feelings are returned by him to almost all the other characters, with the exception of Shohreh, an Iranian immigrant whom he his in love with. Other than her, he uses and abuses others for his own purposes. He has no use for the other emigrants, especially those who try to elevate themselves, nor does he have any liking for those Canadians who like to pretend to appreciate the culture that the immigrants have brought with them, but who distance themselves when they find some other area of interest.

The story is told through the eyes and the stories of the narrator, often going back to talk about his past in Lebanon. He shares with Shohreh horror stories from their lives in their home countries, and they both have to deal with horrible people from their past who have come over to Canada and still lead lives of privilege, looking down on the lower members of where they have come from. It is this shared circumstance, and his love for Shohreh that leads to his only act which is not just in his self-interest.

This is not a book which ordinarily would catch my interest, but I am glad I read it. It is dark and course, and probably not everyone's ideal read, but I found it difficult to put down and the characters to be interesting, even if it is difficult to like them. I would definitely recommend this, and would like to read Hage's first book.

Having read this book months ago, three things still stick with me: really good writing, reminds me of Kafka's Metamorphosis, and the sex stuff is too strange. Basically, Cockroach is the story of an immigrant's experience in Montreal, during which he is seeing a therapist after a failed suicide attempt. He provides unsavory details of his upbringing interspersed with current day happenings. Sometimes, this involves transforming into or out of cockroach form. Although some of the writing is brilliant, like this sentence, one of the tale's tamer moments, during which he, as an insect, follows and spies on a woman named Genevieve (p 80), "She lived in a rich neighborhood with shop windows displaying expensive clothing and restaurants that echoed with the sounds of expensive utensils, utensils that dug swiftly into livers and ribs and swept sensually above the surface of yellow butter the colour of a September moon, a cold field of hay, the tint of a temple's stained glass, of brass lamps and altars, of beer jars, wet and full beneath wooden handles that gave me a thirst for an executioner's hands...," and the cockroach angle is clever, the frequent inappropriate sexual situations and references just aren't my cup of tea. Better: The Brief and Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao by Junot Diaz, The Metamorphosis by Franz Kafka, and The Girl with the Dragon Tatoo by Stieg Larsson.

I have always enjoyed novels that tackle the topic of immigration and life of immigrants in the North America. This novel is one of the best contemporary works of fiction I read recently. Author Rawi Hage cuts to the core of the painful immigrant experience. A small group of middle eastern immigrants form community of social misfits forced to interact together. They are group of artists, musicians and political refugees damaged by their past but still attached to their culture, language, music and food.

The main protagonist of this story is a lonely man, living on the verge of poverty and who tried killing himself. He is in love with a beautiful Iranian woman and attends weekly sessions with his psychoterapist. His existance is pitiful and it is obvious that he has psychological issues -- he is either a pathological liar or his mind is unable to distinguish reality from imagination. The unfolding of his life (and his mind) is so compelling, I was unable to put the book down until I finished reading it. I just had to know what happens to the character from the moment I started reading the book and that was the hook that kept me on until I read the end. Fantastic piece of work. I absolutely love this book and will recommend book to friends and book lovers.