- Paperback: 496 pages
- Publisher: Picador (5 Jun 2009)
- Language English
- ISBN-10: 0330454471
- ISBN-13: 978-0330454476
- Product Dimensions: 19.2 x 13 x 3.6 cm
- Average Customer Review: 5.0 out of 5 stars See all reviews (1 customer review)
- Amazon Bestsellers Rank: 418,690 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
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Product Description
Review
'a son returns to his dying father in Beirut with a feast of ancient folklore up his sleeve and enchantment in his soul.'
--Metro
--Metro
Review
'gloriously mesmorising...a series of wonderfully vivid and spellbinding tales of adventure, bravery, passionate love affairs.'
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Customer Reviews
Most Helpful Customer Reviews
8 of 11 people found the following review helpful
Format:Paperback
This is a wonderful, wonderful novel - something to really got lost in over a summer holiday. It's rich with the themes of history, war, religion, art and literature, and yet the beauty is in the detail, and the terrifically vibrant characters whose lives are filled with tragedy, horror, glory and love. Truly magnificent, it deserves to become a classic.
Most Helpful Customer Reviews on Amazon.com (beta)
Amazon.com:
26 reviews
43 of 43 people found the following review helpful
Magus Alameddine
24 April 2008
Rabih Alameddine's new novel, "The Hakawati," is a sprawling, delicious panoply of over-the-top tales of love, sex, murder, heroism, magic, loss, triumph, skulduggery, noblesse, repentance, lies, redemption, loyalty, curses, and just about everything else, all plaited into a set of parallel narratives which augment and illuminate each other. It is a masterful and startling accomplishment, a sort of literary maqam that twists and turns on recurrent themes and characters. The reader initially wonders how to relate all these seemingly unrelated stories, but quickly notices with growing awareness how they are really jazz riffs on single themes, embellishments that sear those themes into our consciousness so that we can't get them out of our heads.
This is not the first time that Alameddine has used such literary structure. His first novel, "Koolaids," interlaced two parallel narratives, the worst years of the AIDS crisis and the civil war in Lebanon. There, as in "The Hakawati," the narratives resonated one with the other. And his second novel, "I, the Divine," an ingenious work all in first chapters of his narrator's never-to-be-completed memoir, managed to give us multiple perspectives on events told by a single character, much as The Hakawati gives us multiple views of universal themes that echo through very different tales. But whereas the two earlier works had some rough edges and unpolished facets, "The Hakawati" is a perfect gem, burnished, intricate, complex, and with every feature serving to magnify its brilliance and dazzle. Here is a writer who has grown into his initial promise, perhaps beyond it.
It is easy to fall in love with the tales themselves; they are both currently relevant and timeless as well as entirely engrossing. The more discerning reader will also delight in the language of this book. Like other writers using English as a second language for their literary medium (Conrad and Nabokov come to mind), Alameddine is almost preternaturally aware of its sound and cadence, its semantic subtleties, its echos and reverberations of meanings. He is clearly besotted with English, and we follow him in a vertiginous trance like a whirling dervish, lost in the ecstasy of the moment. Alameddine is nothing short, it seems, of a literary magician, pulling our emotions out of his hat, our dreams from out his sleeve, and showing them to us in a way that forces us to see them anew. This novel is a masterpiece, unlike anything I've ever read before or ever hope to read again.
This is not the first time that Alameddine has used such literary structure. His first novel, "Koolaids," interlaced two parallel narratives, the worst years of the AIDS crisis and the civil war in Lebanon. There, as in "The Hakawati," the narratives resonated one with the other. And his second novel, "I, the Divine," an ingenious work all in first chapters of his narrator's never-to-be-completed memoir, managed to give us multiple perspectives on events told by a single character, much as The Hakawati gives us multiple views of universal themes that echo through very different tales. But whereas the two earlier works had some rough edges and unpolished facets, "The Hakawati" is a perfect gem, burnished, intricate, complex, and with every feature serving to magnify its brilliance and dazzle. Here is a writer who has grown into his initial promise, perhaps beyond it.
It is easy to fall in love with the tales themselves; they are both currently relevant and timeless as well as entirely engrossing. The more discerning reader will also delight in the language of this book. Like other writers using English as a second language for their literary medium (Conrad and Nabokov come to mind), Alameddine is almost preternaturally aware of its sound and cadence, its semantic subtleties, its echos and reverberations of meanings. He is clearly besotted with English, and we follow him in a vertiginous trance like a whirling dervish, lost in the ecstasy of the moment. Alameddine is nothing short, it seems, of a literary magician, pulling our emotions out of his hat, our dreams from out his sleeve, and showing them to us in a way that forces us to see them anew. This novel is a masterpiece, unlike anything I've ever read before or ever hope to read again.
16 of 16 people found the following review helpful
READ THIS BOOK, PLEASE
22 Jun 2008
Amazon Verified Purchase
For those who seek to understand the bonds in famililes, this book is a find. There is nothing heroic or unusual about this family, their happenings and trials are the stuff of common lives. The portrait is honest and emotionally deep.
Layered onto the story of this multigeneration family are the wild fables of Lebanon. In one moment you want to hear what happens to the family, the next you are totally absorbed in some wild tale. Tales emerge within tales to our delight.
I haven't enjoyed a book this much in ages.
Layered onto the story of this multigeneration family are the wild fables of Lebanon. In one moment you want to hear what happens to the family, the next you are totally absorbed in some wild tale. Tales emerge within tales to our delight.
I haven't enjoyed a book this much in ages.
10 of 10 people found the following review helpful
The Hakawati was a full sensory explosion
20 May 2008
`The Hakawati' is a plethora of tales of heroism, magic, death, victory, love, sex, redemption and lies, and just about everything else you can imagine woven into one story about one guy and his family roots.
Since finishing `The Hakawati', I have found myself wishing the story had never ended. I have opened the book and read a passage here and there, just to stay in the story for as long as possible. This book will have a lasting effect on any reader of any genre. Its classic, its modern, its an all around great read! Its a "jump right in" kind of book that will leave you exhausted, yet longing for more!
The main story set in the hospital is joined with two Arabian tales, one of Fatima, a slave girl who conquers the heart of a genie, and the other of Baybars, a slave prince and his servant, Othman. Within the stories are other stories of the rise of Osama's family's rise in society and the disintegration of a civilized society by competing religions and ideologies. There are references to the Koran, the Bible, Shakespeare, Homer and many other well-known classics.
Not only does Rabih Alameddine tell the story of a storyteller, he is the Hakawati. `The Hakawati' is a brilliant masterpiece of family roots, mythology and adventure. This book is a collection of fairy tales for adults. While I was reading some of the journeys in the book seemed a bit exhausting, and I had to put the book down. Upon reflection, though, they weren't exhausting, the experience of reading the Hakawati was a full sensory explosion. There is a story of Osama's great grandfather and his first experience with a Hakawati, the story describes how the audience reacted to the great Hakawati's storytelling techniques. Alameddine took his own descriptions of the audience and wrote this book in a way that his readers would transform into that audience whether they realized it or not.
--excerpted from its original form at Old Musty Books
Since finishing `The Hakawati', I have found myself wishing the story had never ended. I have opened the book and read a passage here and there, just to stay in the story for as long as possible. This book will have a lasting effect on any reader of any genre. Its classic, its modern, its an all around great read! Its a "jump right in" kind of book that will leave you exhausted, yet longing for more!
The main story set in the hospital is joined with two Arabian tales, one of Fatima, a slave girl who conquers the heart of a genie, and the other of Baybars, a slave prince and his servant, Othman. Within the stories are other stories of the rise of Osama's family's rise in society and the disintegration of a civilized society by competing religions and ideologies. There are references to the Koran, the Bible, Shakespeare, Homer and many other well-known classics.
Not only does Rabih Alameddine tell the story of a storyteller, he is the Hakawati. `The Hakawati' is a brilliant masterpiece of family roots, mythology and adventure. This book is a collection of fairy tales for adults. While I was reading some of the journeys in the book seemed a bit exhausting, and I had to put the book down. Upon reflection, though, they weren't exhausting, the experience of reading the Hakawati was a full sensory explosion. There is a story of Osama's great grandfather and his first experience with a Hakawati, the story describes how the audience reacted to the great Hakawati's storytelling techniques. Alameddine took his own descriptions of the audience and wrote this book in a way that his readers would transform into that audience whether they realized it or not.
--excerpted from its original form at Old Musty Books
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