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Overview
“Here is absolute beauty. One of the finest novels I’ve read in years.” —Junot DiazAn astonishingly inventive, wonderfully exuberant novel that takes us from the shimmering dunes of ancient Egypt to the war-torn streets of twenty-first-century Lebanon.
In 2003, Osama al-Kharrat returns to Beirut after many years in America to stand vigil at his father’s deathbed. The city is a shell of the Beirut Osama remembers, but he and his friends and family take solace in the things that have always sustained them: gossip, laughter, and, above all, stories.
Osama’s grandfather was a hakawati, or storyteller, and his bewitching stories—of his arrival in Lebanon, an orphan of the Turkish wars, and of how he earned the name al-Kharrat, the fibster—are interwoven with classic tales of the Middle East, stunningly reimagined. Here are Abraham and Isaac; Ishmael, father of the Arab tribes; the ancient, fabled Fatima; and Baybars, the slave prince who vanquished the Crusaders. Here, too, are contemporary Lebanese whose stories tell a larger, heartbreaking tale of seemingly endless war—and of survival.
Like a true hakawati, Rabih Alameddine has given us an Arabian Nights for this century—a funny, captivating novel that enchants and dazzles from its very first lines: “Listen. Let me take you on a journey beyond imagining. Let me tell you a story.”
Synopsis
In 2003, Osama al-Kharrat returns to Beirut after many years in America to stand vigil at his father's deathbed. As the family gathers, stories begin to unfold: Osama's grandfather was a hakawati, or storyteller, and his bewitching tales are interwoven with classic stories of the Middle East. Here are Abraham and Isaac; Ishmael, father of the Arab tribes; the beautiful Fatima; Baybars, the slave prince who vanquished the Crusaders; and a host of mischievous imps. Through Osama, we also enter the world of the contemporary Lebanese men and women whose stories tell a larger, heartbreaking tale of seemingly endless war, conflicted identity, and survival. With The Hakawati, Rabih Alameddine has given us an Arabian Nights for this century.
The Barnes & Noble Review
Whether you read a sanitized version as a child or a bawdier version later on, the setup of Arabian Nights is well known. In the centuries-old collection of tales, Scheherazade saves her own life by bewitching her husband, a Persian king who marries a virgin each day only to have her executed the following morning, with a series of stories drawn out over 1,001 nights. The Hakawati, the new novel by Rabih Alameddine, is something of a modern-day Arabian Nights, and in this soaring, epic book, stories also serve as lifelines, albeit in a less literal way.
Editorials
Laila Halaby
We come across many hakawatis: the grandfather, who was one by trade; Uncle Jihad, a car salesman ("modern-day storyteller"); and Osama al-Kharrat, the main character, who has been living in the United States for years and is returning to Beirut to visit his dying father. The ultimate hakawati, however, is the author himself, who has managed to convey, while writing in English, the art of Arabic oral storytelling…At this time in history, when we are constantly told stories but seldom well entertained, Alameddine juxtaposes truth and fiction, contemporary lust and bawdy tales of the past, today's grief and sorrow in the ancient world. Is it to remind us that nothing is new? To help us put it all in perspective? Or is it simply, in the tradition of all hakawatis, to tell a good story? Whatever his intention, the result is a delightful book that should be savored, perhaps over a small cup of very thick coffee, thrice boiled with sugar and a pinch of cardamom.—The Washington Post
Lorraine Adams
If any work of fiction might be powerful enough to transcend the mountain of polemic, historical inquiry, policy analysis and reportage that stands between the Western reader and the Arab soul, it's this wonder of a book—a book not about a jihadi but a hakawati (Arabic for storyteller)…In this book, where searing political upheavals like the Lebanese civil war figure but don't dominate, and in an era when almost all we seem to see of the Middle East is terrorism, it's bracing to come upon a work—and a world—that expands our narrow vision, transforming it to one of multiplicity, enchanting it with hope.—The New York Times
Publishers Weekly
Stories descend from stories as families descend from families in the magical third novel from Alameddine (I, the Divine), telling tales of contemporary Lebanon that converge, ingeniously, with timeless Arabic fables. With his father dying in a Beirut hospital, Osama al-Khattar, a Los Angeles software engineer, returns in 2003 for the feast of Eid al-Hada. As he keeps watch with his sister, Lina, and extended family, Osama narrates the family history, going back to his great-grandparents, and including his grandfather, a hakawati, or storyteller. Their stories are crosscut with two sinuous Arabian tales: one of Fatima, a slave girl who torments hell and conquers the heart of Afreet Jehanam, a genie; another of Baybars, the slave prince, and his clever servant, Othman.
Osama's family story generates a Proustian density of gossip: their Beirut is luxuriant as only a hopelessly insular world on the cusp of dissolution can be; its interruption by the savagery that takes hold of the city in the '70s is shocking. The old, tolerant Beirut is symbolized by Uncle Jihad: a gay, intensely lively storyteller, sexually at odds with a society he loves. Uncle Jihad's death marks a symbolic break in the chain of stories and traditions-unless Osama assumes his place in the al-Khattar line. Almost as alluring is the subplot involving a contemporary Fatima as a femme fatale whose charms stupefy and lure jewelry from a whole set of Saudi moneymen, and her sexy sister Mariella, whose beauty queen career (helped by the votes of judges cowed by her militia leader lovers) is tragically, and luridly, aborted.
Alameddine's own storytelling ingenuity seems infinite: out of it he hasfashioned a novel on a royal scale, as reflective of past empires as present. (Apr.)
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.School Library Journal
Alameddine (Koolaids; The Perv) assumes the role of a hakawati, a Middle Eastern storyteller, in a tour de force that interweaves at least five separate narratives into an exquisite tapestry in the denouement. He spins the story of Osama al-Kharrat, a Lebanese American returning to Beirut to sit at his dying father's bedside; the al-Kharrat family's rise to prominence, from its beginnings in a Lebanese Druze village and a Turkish Armenian village; the Mameluk warrior Baybars, known for his victory over the Mongols; the mythic Fatima, who became the consort of the jinni Afrit-Jehanam; and, above all, the disintegration of a tolerant, civilized Lebanon into a battleground for competing religions, ethnicities, and ideologies. Each narrative is further enhanced by smaller stories about raising pigeons and playing traditional melodies as well as tales drawn from the Koran, the Bible, The Arabian Nights, Ovid, Shakespeare, and every person who ever spoke to the author. This magical novel is epic in proportion and will enchant readers everywhere. Recommended for all libraries.
—Andrea Kempf Copyright 2007 Reed Business Information
Kirkus Reviews
Alameddine (I, the Divine, 2001, etc.) mingles a four-generation family saga with a cornucopia of Arabian tales and historical dramas to create a one-of-a-kind novel. Osama al-Kharrat returns in 2003 to Beirut, where his family once owned a prosperous car dealership, to visit his dying father Farid. Their relationship has always been uneasy, as was Farid's with his own father. Osama's grandfather was a hakawati: "a teller of tales, myths, and fables . . . someone who earns his keep by beguiling an audience with yarns." Farid, ashamed of a progenitor dependent on the favor of the local bey, was none too happy that Osama loved his grandfather's stories, nor did he want the boy to play the oud, a traditional Middle Eastern instrument. Farid's generation were modern Lebanese, not particularly religious or invested in their heritage. Right up to the moment they had to flee war-torn Beirut in 1977, Osama's family remained convinced their country would not be directly affected by the Arab world's endless battle with Israel. Osama, who has lived most of his adult life in California, speedily sinks back into the excitable embrace of his extended family (including numerous strongminded women) as they take turns at his father's hospital bedside. The history of the al-Kharrats and of Lebanon unfolds side by side with multiple strands of Arabian folklore creatively reimagined by Alameddine, who mischievously informs us at one point that his surname is a variant of Aladdin. Not content to let a single jinni out of a bottle, the author summons up a vast array of imps, demons, witches, warriors, slave kings and fierce females to embed his contemporary characters in the splendor of Middle Eastern culture.Chief among these mythic figures are Fatima and Baybars, plucked from legend to serve the author's art as he entwines their odysseys with the al-Kharrats' throughout the book. There's so much going on here that readers will occasionally feel overwhelmed, and the multilayered narrative sags slightly under its own weight in the middle section. But no one interested in boundary-defying fiction will want to miss Alameddine's high-wire act. A dizzying, prodigal display of storytelling overabundance. First printing of 40,000The Barnes & Noble Review
Whether you read a sanitized version as a child or a bawdier version later on, the setup of Arabian Nights is well known. In the centuries-old collection of tales, Scheherazade saves her own life by bewitching her husband, a Persian king who marries a virgin each day only to have her executed the following morning, with a series of stories drawn out over 1,001 nights. The Hakawati, the new novel by Rabih Alameddine, is something of a modern-day Arabian Nights, and in this soaring, epic book, stories also serve as lifelines, albeit in a less literal way."Listen," the book begins. "Allow me to be your god. Let me take you on a journey beyond imagining. Let me tell you a story." With that, Alameddine launches into the legend of Fatima, an ancient Egyptian slave who becomes the lover of an underworld jinni and gives birth to a child who is half human, half demon. Fatima's story unfolds alongside two other primary narratives. One is the story of Baybars, a 13th-century sultan who vanquished Mongols and Crusaders, which Fatima's master, a prominent emir, tells his pregnant wife in the belief that hearing of rousing adventures will ensure that the child she is carrying is male. The other narrative, the book's most significant, is the contemporary tale of Osama al-Kharrat, told in the first person. Osama, a Lebanese who leaves home for America during the 1970s to escape his country's brutal civil war, has returned to Beirut in 2003 to be at his father's deathbed.
Hakawati is the Arabic word for "storyteller," and the book does have an actual hakawati, Osama's grandfather, Ismail, who earns his living by entertaining the local bey (chieftain) with legends and fables. But Osama explains that the term is derived from the Lebanese word haki, which means "talk" or "conversation." "This suggests that in Lebanese the mere act of talking is storytelling," he says. True enough, all of the book's characters are, in their own way, hakawatis. Everyone has a story to tell, and the book is bursting with them: stories that run parallel to each other, stories within stories, stories that bleed into each other. It would be no surprise if there were 1,001 stories packed into the book, and their sources are as far-ranging as Arabian Nights (natch), the Bible, the Koran, Shakespeare, Ovid, Calvino, and, according to the author's acknowledgments, "the input of almost every Lebanese I know."
By the book's end we have learned a great deal about Osama's extended family. As relatives enter and exit the hospital where his father is clinging to life, he and his sister gossip and reminisce, revealing the rivalries, resentments, alliances, and affairs that have long animated the clan. Osama's sections of the book move backward and forward in time, spanning the courtships of his parents, grandparents, and great-grandparents, their lives and their deaths. While prewar, cosmopolitan Beirut is deftly evoked, the devastating conflict informs much of the family history. Some relatives are described in vivid detail, while others merit only a mention, like the great uncle who helped Osama's father start what became a successful international car dealership. "My father loved him deeply," Osama explains. "In the grand scheme of stories, he was nothing, almost an unmentionable, for he was not an odd character or an interesting one. He was a thread, one of many, without which the tapestry would crumble, the yarn fray, and the tale unravel." In this family, immortality is achieved by those who can tell a story and those worthy of having one told about them.
While the title of the book ostensibly refers to Osama's grandfather, Alameddine himself, of course, is the hakawati extraordinaire, weaving his magic carpet with formidable skill. The author of a short story collection and two previous novels -- which share The Hakawati 's preoccupation with storytelling and identity and its inclination to defy genre boundaries -- he enchants and dazzles while also slyly insisting, through his characters' frequent debates over storytelling, that we grapple with the act's meaning and power. When he is a boy, Osama's mother warns him, "Stories are for entertainment only. They never mean anything." His grandfather rejects didactic and hackneyed tales, insisting, "A story needs to be bewitching." His uncle Jihad tells him that "what happens is of little significance compared with the stories we tell ourselves about what happens. Events matter little, only stories of those events affect us."
Alameddine winks from behind the curtain with his heroic depiction of Baybars. Throughout the book, the reader is regaled with allegorical stories of the sultan's bravery and his righteous rule, but toward the end of the novel, a young Osama mentions the great warrior to his mother and uncle while the three are waiting out an intense round of shelling in their apartment building's underground garage. His uncle disparages Baybars, insisting, "His subjects despised him, because he was a ruthless, fork-tongued megalomaniac who rose to power through treachery and murder.... Baybars consolidated his power and created a cult of personality by paying, bribing, and forcing an army of hakawatis to promulgate tales of his valor and piety." Which Baybars to believe in? And then, of course, the more consequential question: why does it matter?
Scholar Jack Zipes (who happens to have edited a modern edition of Arabian Nights) has written extensively about the power of fairy tales to help societies cope with a changing and baffling world. "No tale is ever new," he has said. "We are always retelling and building on experience and wisdom to navigate our way through a world not of our making." At one point, finding himself unable to answer a simple question, Osama says ruefully, "I could tell stories, but explanations always eluded me." But like many of us, he ultimately understands the world, and explains himself to it, through stories. The final word of this original and important novel is, fittingly, the same as its first: "Listen." Throughout the book it has been an invitation; it is, at last, an exhortation. As Osama urgently recites family lore to his fading, unresponsive father, one can't help but hope: maybe a story really can save a life. --Barbara Spindel
Barbara Spindel has covered books for Time Out New York, Newsweek.com, Details, and Spin. She holds a Ph.D. in American Studies.