Cockroach

"Cockroach" weaves themes of the meaning of being human, sanity, sex, and revenge, into 300 short pages, while also providing a scathing indictment of the way "civilized" society handles immigration. The novel's protagonist, himself an immigrant, struggles to survive in a world that clearly separates the haves from the have nots. At some points he confuses himself with one of the cockroaches that inhabit his apartment; the cockroach metaphor recurs throughout the novel in subtle, effective ways.

The novel is dark but steeped with humanity; the author shows us the stories of various characters who have immigrated to Canada and the emotional scars that they carry. He highlights the lives and tales of those who are often forgotten and marginalized due to their status. The writing is rich and smooth, and builds up to a suspenseful, memorable finale. Highly recommended. ( )

Rawi Hage has said that he writes without a plan. He's not one for detailed outlines; instead, he writes himself into a situation and then turns around and writes his way back out of it. And this approach is evident in his novels.

De Niro's Game was a two-part novel in three parts: Hage seemed not to notice that he had already reached a plausible conclusion, and tacked on a contrived plot to bring things to a close. And it felt contrived, improbable, implausible, as we went from being just some kid getting by in the violent streets of civil-war Beirut to dealing with Mossad agents in Paris.

Hage has the same problem here. Having evoked a wonderful character who is simply struggling to get from one day to the next as an unemployed (or barely employed) immigrant in the dead of a Montreal winter, he runs out of ideas and moves us into a revenge plot with diplomats and bodyguards and former torturers. It's all rather improbable; if this were the immigrant experience in Canada, we'd all be stepping over bodies in the streets.

(Equally improbable is the sexual prowess of Hage's characters; no matter how old and crusty their socks, no matter how unwashed they may be, Hage's protagonists never find difficulty in seducing women. But I digress.)

But ... Hage is nonetheless an impressive writer, an original voice with a sharp, observant eye. In Cockroach, he reigns in the worst excesses of his style -- a tendency to unleash torrents of cascading images that overwhelm the page -- and writes in a more restrained, mature way. It's as if, with the first novel out of the way, he no longer feels the need to pull out all the stops, and Cockroach is a consistently better-written book than De Niro's Game. Whatever the flaws of Hage's plotting, anything he writes remains worth reading.

Something in the book tells me that I really like it, particularly Hage's writing. His sentences and lines quite often make me go, "That's it! There's no better way of pitting it." Something else in the book tells me that I dislike some of the images that he puts in my head: that same pair of socks. (Although, those new socks and the new pair of boots, good call, Rawi!) I think some of the smells that Hage manages to create in my head I dislike as well. But that's why it's titled the way it is.

For the majority of the novel I disliked the existence of the character Genevieve, as I was always anticipating something life-changing popping out of her and it never came. Note that this is not to say that I disliked the character. I just didn't see the point of why we needed to always go back to her. Then at the beginning of the final chapter I almost felt that we were going to read about her. At that point I thought that it wasn't time for that story, and if I started to find out about her I would really hate her existence. Luckily it never happened. We marched out of her office and she remained an essential but not helpful shrink. For that, then, I told myself I that I liked the book, because I am the type of reader to seek an ending that works logically. Not that it has to end well, it just has to fit, and for me Hage, and I base this on having read his other novel, DeNiro's Game, is the fitting-ending sort of writer.

A great read. ( )

I have such mixed feelings about this book. Read the other two long reviews to get a taste for it. It is a powerful story that will remain with me, the characters are unique and largely unforgettable. but...
it made me wince with the overexhuberant use of the descriptive phrase, which I know I know, defines the psychotic nature of the protagonist...
Isn't this too much though? She lived in a rich neighbourhood 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 senusally 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.... ( )

Rawi Hage: Cockroach
I was not overwhelmed by Hage’s De Niro’s Game (which won the Impac Dublin Prize) I’m thinking that perhaps I should give it another chance after reading Cockroach. There is exuberance, life, wonderful descriptions and use of metaphor and similes in Hage’s writing. For instance, this description of the Montreal cold (which dominates the novel): “…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.” The bleakness of winter and the complications it imposes in just staying alive provide an appropriate backdrop for lives of the people portrayed in this novel. It is only towards the end that we see the first tentative signs of spring and renewal, but those are fragile, even more so in life than in nature.

The story is told through the first person of our protagonist, a young immigrant living on welfare in Montreal, continually searching for food, living in a cockroach-infested apartment, working deadend jobs as a busboy, caging shelter, money, food and cigarettes from friends and lovers, snorting whatever small income he can, hanging around the immigrant world which he despises, screwing everything he can get his hands on, and exercising the one true skill he has brought from his homeland as a thief and break-and-enter artist. The story of his life in his homeland unfolds primarily in conversations he has with a psychologist who is court-appointed after he tried to commit suicide by hanging himself in a park. That ineffectual effort pretty well reflected his deeply unhappy life and self-loathing. As he says himself, “…it was just my need to hide from the sun and not see anyone. It was the necessity I felt to strip the world from everything around me and exist underneath it all, without objects, people, light, or sound. It was my need to unfold an eternal blanket that would cover everything, seal the sky and my window, and turn the world into an insect’s play.” He is haunted by a sense of insignificance in life and to his own life: “I saw the ray of light entering my window and realized how insignificant I was in its presence, how oblivious it was to my existence. My problem was not that I was negligent towards life, but that somehow I always felt neglected by it.” It is through discussions with the therapist that we learn of the experience in his homeland whereby he set in motion a train of events that led to the murder of his sister, a beloved sister living a life of abuse that he anguished over but felt helpless and too weak to prevent. More than enough material for his subsequent unhappiness with the world and himself.

Two principal metaphors appear continuously throughout the book. The first is that of the cockroach, an insect that is as ubiquitous and indestructible as a species as it is unwelcome, a creature that scurries away from light and lives in any environment whether dank or dry. Our hero fights a continuous battle against them while at the same time identifying with them, with their loathsomeness and dark, underground lives, and as he breaks into a house or apartment, he thinks of himself as a cockroach slipping along pipes, under doors, up walls. The other is that of drains, of water swirling down sinks or toilets where everything, everything is “swept away…everything converges in the same stream, along the same trajectory”, so that liquids and substances from very different places and sources are channeled and converge and flow together in unforeseeable and unpredictable ways as does life as when our hero’s lover recognizes an official, an ex-police or military man from her homeland who had held her captive, raped and beaten her for weeks. The swirling drains and converging waters can be both liberating for the present and confining from the past.

As a thief, our hero moves beyond just stealing goods. He enters homes and steals special things such as love letters or a favourite pair of slippers, things that have no monetary value to him or to the victim, but the act itself (and our hero makes sure the victim knows he was there) is a violation of private space, a compromise of perceived security and safety intended to cause maximum discomfort and distress to the victims. All of which is in keeping with the hero’s feeling that there is no such thing as private space, that any such space can be invaded and marked and changed, as was his life through his inability to protect his sister and then his unwitting role in her death.

In the pictures he presents, Hage is critical of the blandishments offered immigrants to come to Canada only to end up as cabbies and busboys with little or no future, but he combines this with an unrelenting criticism of the lives and fantasies of those same immigrants, of the stories they tell others and sometimes tell themselves. Even an immigrant who might be seen as a “success”, a wealthy restaurant owner, is portrayed as grasping, obsequious, controlling and demanding. Nor do the “Canadians” in the novel come off very well. The therapist is well-meaning but naïve and bureaucratic and more often than not, we have the sense that our protagonist is playing her anyway he wants. The others are young, hedonistic people whom our hero despises but whom he uses as much as he can for shelter, food and sex. He sees their lives as nothing but artifice: “…any hint of misery from me, or problems or violence, was automatically dismissed and replaced with something happy, light, or pretty….All her friends, too, lived in a state of permanent denial of the bad smells from sewers, infested slums, unheated apartments, single mothers on welfare, worn-out clothing. No, everything had to be perfect… presentation, always presentation, the ultimate mask.”

There is redemption in the final act in the novel, but it comes at a terrible price. Redemption in the sense that our hero does find love, which in fact takes us back to the opening line of the novel, “I am in love with Shohreh. But I don’t trust my emotions anymore.” Redemption in his last act which helps to expiate the soul-searing guilt he feels about his sister. But the act will ruin his life and the final images pull the two main metaphors together: “I looked at the water that gathered and rushed towards the drain. Then I crawled and swam above the water, and when I saw a leaf carried along by the stream of soap and water as if it were a gondola in Venice, I climbed onto it and shook like a dancing gypsy, and I steered it with my glittering wings towards the underground.”

This is a novel of urgent, pungent, exuberant writing; it is a novel of dislocation and not-belonging; it is a novel of the cruelty that people do to one another and the lifelong damages that result; it is a novel about how experiences and lives swirl about each other and mix and flow together; it is a novel about how realities collide; it is a novel about the facades of lives. It is very good and highly recommended.