My rating: 5 of 5 stars
I always wonder about encountering an author for the first time when he already has a number of books under the belt. Is the one I just read, my first, representative of those prior ones? Has he advanced his craft, or is he just treading water? At the end of the day, one can only ever judge a book on its individual merits; even going back and reading earlier ones is not the same as following an author book to book right from the beginning of his career.
Of course, this is the natural process by which most authors acquire new readers. By stumbling across Carnival, and really enjoying it, I am much more likely to be attracted to Rawi Hage’s back catalogue, as well as recognise his name whenever he publishes something new. This organic, attrition-like relationship between reader and author is perennially fascinating.
So … what does this say about my reading experience of Carnival? Well, this is precisely why I love discovering new writers: to come across a book by a writer I have never read before, to be sufficiently intrigued or curious enough to give it a try, and then to be completely blown away by the experience.
This is by no means a perfect novel. I would go so far as to say that it is as much frustrating as it is illuminating. It is a messy blend of pseudo magic realism and social commentary, it frequently revels too much in the seamy and sordid side of its story; the central character and his assorted hangers-on are often quite detestable.
But there is something truly genuine and incendiary about this tale of an immigrant taxi driver in an unnamed Latin America city on the cusp of a major carnival. Such a plot device is by no means original, and one has to be careful of using so familiar a device to frame a main protagonist who is, in essence, an omniscient narrator.
Hage avoids such pitfalls with aplomb, mainly through the sheer energy of his writing, which is as embellished and purple as a lounge suite in a Saudi Arabian brothel, if you can imagine such a facility … It takes getting used to, this torrent of overripe verbiage. But when you do, you get swept away by the dramatic force of the story, its carefully timed revelations, and the quiet observations and nuances that streak across its surface like shooting stars.
The final chapter is appallingly bleak and grim, and clashes quite markedly with the attempted whimsy of the ‘ending’ ending. Still, this is a bravura effort by a supremely talented writer. By turns shocking and mesmeric, one is really forced inside the skin and mind of Fly the itinerant taxi driver, mass reader, serial masturbator, pseudo-intellectual and magic-carpet rider.
A Book Lover's Discourse 