Books About Book-lovers

Rawi Hage in black and white.When Hrabal wrote Too Loud a Solitude, he lived in a literate country that, in his own words, “would lay down their lives for a bale of compacted thoughts,” under a government that loathed books and the people who wrote them (Too Loud was published underground in 1976, which for some meant hammering out every copy individually on a typewriter.) Since Too Loud, books have appeared like Arturo Perez-Reverte’s The Club Dumas and Carlos Ruis Zafon’s Cemetery of Forgotten Books, about book-lovers who go to extremes over their beloved bales of compacted thoughts. Rawi Hage’s Carnival joins them, and openly embraces influences like Hrabal.

The first sign that Fly, Carnival ’s narrator, belongs to this misfit club of book-lovers, is his apartment, “filled with towers of books stretching up in all directions,” modeled after Hrabal’s Hant’a who lives in narrow caverns between all of his rescued books.

Fly is an atheist from the circus and now drives a taxi in a fictionalized Montreal with the proper Catholic carnival the real city lacks. He plays observer, accomplice, and chauffeur to the people of the night, including a drug dealer, a wealthy libertine, and several escorts, one of whom does charity work by charging half-price in the meat-packing district. At one point, he assists an old activist friend in forcing members of corporate and state apparatus to recite Amiri Baraka and James Joyce at gunpoint in the back of Fly’s cab. The line that separates the privileged from the poor is a big one in Carnival, but it’s dissected by another, possibly even more important division: book-lovers and book-haters. Book-haters, whether suburban and privileged or criminals and immigrants, like Fredao the Angolan pimp, are cruel and misanthropic.Edward Docx’s review of Carnival at The Guardian comes down on Hage for letting his hatred for corporate capitalism and religion overwhelm the book at times. Much of Carnival’s emotional weight comes from the same place that Too Loud ’s does: the crushing defeat and oppression experienced by people with boundless generosity, imagination, and kindness. The obligatory bearded lady provides one of the most moving descriptions of the kind of misfit Carnival celebrates:

“Do not tell a soul that we are knowers and non-believers … When they come to you with prophets and promises of heavens of honey and milk and milk, remember that we are no more than flowers having our last glance at the world before we die, with grace and gratitude for the wonders we witnessed, for the magic box we built, the animals we loved … We might be jokers, tricksters, rope walkers, and buffoons, but we had never been the kind to swindle desperate believers with falsehoods.”

Hage’s target is not capitalism or Catholicism or Islam, but cruelty and lies, and he channels that passion with art and sensitivity, however full-frontal his assault.

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