Cockroach by Rawi Hage

[PluviophileReader]

3/5 stars.
ebook, 320 pages.
Read from April 01 to 19, 2014.

Cockroach is a very interesting novel and as a reader you either like it or you don’t. That is, if you can tolerate the extremely depressing tone and existential theme. What I enjoyed most about this novel is that it provides the reader with insight into the life of a immigrant struggling in Canada, with a dash of mental illness and some descriptive philosophical ideas about our purpose in life. This review does contain some spoilers but I will mark them appropriately.

The plot is shaped by existential questions that are asked by an unnamed narrator who struggles with poverty, drugs, mental illness and suicide. This story opens with the main character, who is unnamed, sitting in a psychiatrists office somewhere in Montreal, Canada. What you learn as a reader is that the narrator is an unstable man, who enjoys beautiful women, steals and breaks into people’s homes to sit on their couches and eat their food and quite literally thinks of himself as a cockroach. He is obsessed with questions about his own existence and his own purpose. He has been mandated by the state to take therapy sessions as he recently failed at an attempt to hang himself. The psychiatrist is a beautiful blonde woman named Genevieve. It’s obvious from her interactions with the main protagonist that she does not understand him or the world that he lives in.

The protagonist has come to Canada from some unnamed country and the people he associates with are also immigrates to Canada. You meet Reza, who is a sketchy Persian sitar player who is obsessed with his self-worth and luring women into his bed by seducing them with his foreignness and lies. The protagonist isn’t particularly fond of Reza but he does hangout with him and do drugs after Reza finally pays him the forty dollars that he owed him. Through Reza, he meets: Faroud, a gay Persian man who speaks of the persecution and torture he suffered before he came to Canada. “The Professor”, which is what the protagonist calls the man because of his profession, one which, he is no longer doing in Canada. The Professor is a hypocritical man who doesn’t want to admit that he is poor. The protagonist hates this about him so he steals some love-letters from him that detail a weak long-term affair that The Professor has been having. Lastly, he meets Shohreh, a beautiful young woman who you learn **START SPOILER** near the end has been raped by Islamists in Tehran **END SPOILER**. With these character’s stories, the reader is shown each of their struggles in coming to terms what has happened to them as well as trying to live in a new country and the ultimate solitude that it creates. Violence and sex are a constant.

Through the protagonist’s therapy sessions, he is encouraged to get a job. He finds one in a Persian restaurant that Reza plays at occasionally. He works three days a week and becomes friendly with the owners daughter, Sehar. She is young and flirtatious and at one point, the protagonist catches her masturbating. Sehar represents a younger generation of immigrants trying to become the definition of what it is to be “Canadian” and step away from her heritage.

What brings the protagonist’s story into the stories of the people that he meets all together is, through his therapy sessions, you learn that he had a sister once. She married a despicable man who used to beat her ferociously. He admits to conspiring to kill her husband during that time but does not end up following through with it. **START SPOILER** The result of him not being able to kill his sister’s husband unintentionally causes her death. Her husband kills her. After which, you can assume that his inability to deal with this scenario is what instigated him to hang himself in the first place. While developing a romantic relationship with Shohreh, the protagonist learns about her rape and abortion and finds that one of her perpetrators is a customer that comes into the restaurant that he works in. Determined to resolve the situation for Shohreh and the mistakes he made with his sister, the two of them conspire to kill Shohreh’s rapist when he comes to the restaurant one night **END SPOILER**.

The ultimate comment the book is trying to achieve is to show the ineffectiveness of immigrant assimilation and how little the receiving country understands the struggles of a new immigrant. The protagonist thinks of himself as a cockroach because he is living in a world that doesn’t understand him or his needs as a human, so he lives like a cockroach, in filth.

Overall, I would recommend this book for anyone looking for something thought-provoking and well written and is alright with tolerating a bleak tone.