Like a stomach-churning midway octopus ride, Rawi Hage's Carnival is a swirl of oddballs, criminals, revolutionaries, whores and taxi drivers. An independent immigrant hack in a city much like Hage's Montreal, Fly knows his fellow drivers only by their car numbers and nicknames. Most are "spiders" who park at taxi stands waiting for business, while Fly is, of course, one of the "flies"--wanderers "who drive alone and around to pick up the wavers and whistlers." Raised in a circus by a bearded lady, he is comfortable with the misfits who prowl his city, particularly during the annual Carnival bacchanal. He also has an insatiable appetite for books, after acquiring the collection of a doctor who ministered to the freaks, a collection so large that it overwhelms his apartment with "towers of books... a tunnel of books [where] a carnival of heroes bounces from every corner."
Fly is a fine foil for Hage's funny and acerbic observations on everything from religious hypocrisy to aberrant sex--all told with a linguistic virtuosity and lusty bravado that echo James Joyce and Henry Miller. Told in short vignettes, Carnival is the novel of a city defined not so much by its citizens as by the whirling chaos of those who are only wandering visitors. Fly is an observant guide to this circus of humanity and knows that "after this grand act of life, nothing is left but the dust beneath the elephants' feet and the sound of monkeys' clapping." --Bruce Jacobs, founding partner, Watermark Books & Cafe, Wichita, Kan.