Carnival

by Rawi Hage

Overview

A stirring new masterpiece from the IMPAC Dublin Literary Award–winning author of Cockroach and De Niro’s Game.

In Carnival, internationally acclaimed author Rawi Hage takes us into the world of Fly, a taxi driver in a crime-ridden apocalyptic metropolis.

Raised in the circus, the son of a golden-haired trapeze artist and a flying-carpet man, Fly sees everything, taking in all of the city’s carnivalesque beauty and ugliness as he roves through its dizzying streets in his taxi. Fly is a reader, too, and when he’s not in his taxi he is at home in the equally dizzying labyrinth of books that fills his tiny apartment. His best friend is Otto, a political activist who’s in and out of jails and asylums, mourning his dead wife and lost foster son. On one otherwise tawdry night Fly meets Mary, a book-loving passenger with a domineering husband. So begins a romance that is, for Fly, a brief glimmer of light amid the shadows and grit of the Carnival city.

Along with Otto and Mary, Fly introduces us to madmen and revolutionaries, magicians and prostitutes as he picks them up and drops them off, traveling through a nightmarish town that is—we can’t help but notice—a parable for our own debauched, unjust world.

Wildly imaginative and darkly ironic, Carnival is a magnificent achievement.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780393072426
Publisher:	Norton, W. W. & Company, Inc.
Publication date:	06/17/2013
Pages:	304
Product dimensions:	5.80(w) x 8.40(h) x 1.30(d)

About the Author

Rawi Hage  is the author of four novels. Beirut Hellfire Society was longlisted for the Scotiabank Giller Prize, shortlisted for the Rogers Writers’ Trust Fiction Prize, and a finalist for the Governor General’s Literary Award. Born in Beirut, Lebanon, Hage now lives in Montreal.

Editorial Reviews

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. (June)

Publishers Weekly

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

National Post

"Imagine Camus rewriting Taxi Driver."

Toronto Life

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

Telegraph (UK) - Andrew Marszal

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

Toronto Star

"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."

Shelf Awareness

"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."

New Yorker

"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."

Globe and Mail

But then, life's a carnival right? The carnival metaphor/cliché suits the novel well, for the people who populate Hage's world tend to be on the periphery--outsiders, loners, questioners and especially readers. Fly, the main character and narrator, was born to a mother who was a trapeze artist and a father who (literally? figuratively? symbolically?) flew a flying carpet; not exactly mainstream professions. (Fly further complicates his genealogical history by claiming to a friend that his mother was also "a weaver of ropes, who loved for dwarves to nibble on the backs of her knees.") Fly becomes a taxi driver and gets his name because he embodies one of two styles of drivers: the spiders, who stay in one place waiting for their fares, and the flies, who incessantly roam the streets on the prowl for passengers. As one might imagine, this puts Fly in contact with some of the less prepossessing elements in modern urban culture. Another professional problem Fly runs into is the taxi inspector, a woman who "molests" the drivers, and if they resist her advances, they find themselves hit with big fines. Two other outsiders, Otto and Aisha, befriend Fly and take him into their home, but after Aisha dies, Otto is in such deep grief that he enters a mental hospital, unwillingly, for treatment. He gets his revenge on his psychiatrist by having Fly "kidnap" him and forcing him to read a poem by Amiri Baraka (LeRoi Jones). Fly's most important relationship is with Mary, a woman who, unlike her abusive husband, loves books. Hage's characters, while not necessarily larger than life, are certainly weirder than life, and Hage writes about them with humor and affection.

Kirkus Reviews