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Staff Picks TK
March 11, 2008
PW will have another set of Staff Picks coming up April, where everyone will weigh in with most-looked-forward-to summer books.
The book I would've chosen just misses the pubdate criterion. It's called
The Hakawati, and it pubs in April.
There's no Wikipedia entry for 'Hakawati', and there doesn't seem to be anything particularly good to link to instead, but the word means 'storyteller'. Will paste PW's starred & boxed review below. It's pitch perfect, at least in the little bits of it I've read, as it shifts between fictive realities.
The Hakawati
Rabih Alameddine. Knopf, $25.95 (528p) ISBN 978-0-307-26679-6
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 has fashioned a novel on a royal scale, as reflective of past empires as present.
Posted by Michael Scharf on March 11, 2008 | Comments (1)
