BOOK REVIEWS
Cockroach
by Rawi Hage
Price: $29.95 cloth
ISBN: 978-0-88784-209-2
Page count: 312 pp.
Size: 5¼ x 8
Released: Aug.
There is much to admire about Cockroach, Rawi Hage’s ambitious, but ultimately uneven, follow-up to his IMPAC award-winning debut, De Niro’s Game. Like its predecessor, the new novel is narrated by a male protagonist who has survived a childhood in a war zone. The war-torn country, like the narrator himself, is unnamed, but bears marked similarities to the Beirut of De Niro’s Game.
As the new book opens, the narrator, now living in Montreal, has been rescued from a failed suicide attempt and ordered to attend therapy sessions with a female analyst. The well-intentioned but misguided therapist, Genevieve, tries to be empathetic to her new charge, but the gulf that separates her privileged Western background from his violent upbringing proves an insurmountable obstacle to her understanding.
It is this gulf, and the immigrant experience that it fosters, that provides the novel with its heart; the seething anger and bitter ironies that Hage exposes account for the most electrifying sections of the book. When the narrator applies for a job waiting tables in an upscale restaurant, for example, he runs up hard against the casual racism that the maître d’ harbours: “He looked at me with fixed, glittering eyes, and said: Tu es un peu trop cuit pour ça (you are a little too well done for that).” It is left to Majeed, an immigrant taxi driver, to point out the essential irony of their situation: “You know, we come to these countries for refuge and to find better lives, but it is these countries that made us leave our homes in the first place.”
The narrator’s impotent rage leads him to imagine himself as a giant cockroach, the only living creature that will survive after humanity perishes in the apocalypse. He breaks into people’s houses and moves among their possessions, crawling along their walls and their drains. Paradoxically, it is this imaginary other self that affords the narrator respite from what he feels is the otherwise meaningless void of his life: “Yes, I am poor, I am vermin, a bug, I am at the bottom of the scale. But I still exist.”
Hage is an existential writer, and he wears his influences on his sleeve: Camus, Sartre, Céline, Houellebecq. In this story of an imagined metamorphosis, Hage’s largest debt is naturally to Kafka, but in grafting these influences onto a Montreal immigrant’s story, he has managed to recontextualize and transcend them.
The novel begins to lose steam in its second half, which focuses on an Iranian torturer and becomes a kind of revenge narrative. This is disappointing, since the intensity and the energy of the book’s earlier sections are so palpable. Nevertheless, if there is a lingering sense that Cockroach overreaches itself, it is difficult to fault Hage for the attempt. At its best, his second novel is a potent, honest dissection of material that is too often ignored by Canadian writers.
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