Cockroach

by Rawi Hage

This is the second book I have read by him.  I enjoyed his first book De Niro's game.

Hage is a masterful writer, he has exquisite language in his writing.  This book is about an immigrant to Canada, from a war-torn country, who tried to commit suicide and is having to see a psychiatriast as a result.

He is living on welfare and eaking out a living by working in restaurant's part time.  He is often hungry and breaks into people's homes to steal food and other things.  He even breaks into his psychiatrist's house and takes ehr slippers.

He obviously has mental problems, while he has an ongoing battle with the cockroaches in his apartment he sees himself as a cockroach and often visualizes or describes himself as crawling down sewers, into basements etc.  At one point he imagines a humansize cockroach talking to him in his aparment.

He lusts after women but seems to dislike other people he encounters.  As the story goes on we learn that his parents fought, his daughter married young to a man who beat her constantly.  The young man tries to kill his brother in law but when he has the chance he doesn't do it.  He escapes his country instead.  He comes to Canada and learns that there is corrupton here too.  Later his sister is killed by her husband.  He does end up killing a man who was the jailer and rapist (in Iran) of a woman he has a relationshiup with.  So, he will have to disappear like a cockroach.  But as the Jehovah's witnesses tell him, at the end of the world only the cockroaches and God's chosen will survive...

The book obviously reflects ideas of Kafka and Dostoevsky (notes from underground).  While Hage writes beautifully and with passion, we really feel the anxiety and madness of the main character, I think you set yourself up for criticisim when you take on the ideas of literary giants.  It has been a long time since I have read Kafka or Dostoyevsky but I don't think this quite measures up to either of them.

I think I had hoped that the character would find some redemption but instead he just becomes part of the violence he tried to leave behind.  It was a sad book but certainly worth reading.  However, I find it a surprising choice for Canada Reads this year, the theme of which I thought was supposed to be change... I don't really see that this character changed much.... except for the worse.