Happy Pub Day, @beirutiguy! Featured repost from @bestbookgrams: - The Angel of History by Rabih Ala
Happy Pub Day, @beirutiguy! Featured repost from @bestbookgrams: - The Angel of History by Rabih Alameddine (Grove). In the beginning of this fantastical, fantastic novel, the protagonist Jacob says, “I was born homeless, countryless, raceless…no one could claim me or wanted to.” This claim is an exaggeration on every count. He’s the son of two of Beirut’s (very) youthful bourgeoise, and, after his mother flees with him to Egypt, he has the attentions of the kind women of her workplace, a brothel. Yet we can forgive Jacob his occasional melodrama. As a brown man living in America, he’s the subject of frequent harassment, even liberal San Francisco, and as a gay man living in the age of AIDS, his friends—including a wayward but adored boyfriend—have entirely disappeared. Loneliness is the cold wind that pushes this book forward; Jacob experiences plenty of it, and the attention he does receive is entirely unwanted. His most frequent is the Devil, a smarmy, invasive presence that other humans can’t hear or see, and easily the book’s most lively personage (when a psychologist asks Jacob to describe him, Satan implores him to “tell him I sound sophisticated and erudite…I sound like a Miles Davis trumpet”), as well as a host of saints and Death himself. Fascinatingly, as Jacob plunges into depression, Satan emerges as an unlikely ally, one of the tough love variety. The first outcast, from “banal Paradise,” he too has shouldered the hostility and rejection that Jacob has faced as a gay man, an Arab, the son of a prostitute. While Alameddine’s chief offering in the book is a nuanced take on the pleasures and pains of remembrance and forgetting, it’s this alternate perspective on goodness and evil that is most alluring, that upends the centuries of Biblical scholarship he so masterfully dresses down. A story that plays with sex and style, and is unfailingly devastating too, The Angel of History is a mind-bending light beam for our age of apathy. Read it if you liked: This is Your Life, Harriet Chance! Or Colorless Tazaki #bookstagram #bookgram #bookish #instabooks #igreads #igbooks #bibliophile #books #fiction #RabihAlameddine #TheAngelofHistory #lovereading -- source link
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