The Hakawati

by Rabih Alameddine

Book Overview

In 2003, Osama al-Kharrat returns to Beirut after many years in America to stand vigil at his father's deathbed. As the family gathers, stories begin to unfold: Osama's grandfather was a hakawati , or storyteller, and his bewitching tales are interwoven with classic stories of the Middle East. Here are Abraham and Isaac; Ishmael, father of the Arab tribes; the beautiful Fatima; Baybars, the slave prince who vanquished the Crusaders; and a host of...

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0307386279
• ISBN13: 9780307386274
• Release Date: June 2009
• Publisher: Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group
• Length: 528 Pages
• Weight: 0.88 lbs.
• Dimensions: 1.1" x 5.2" x 8.1"

Customer Reviews

A jewel to treasure. I did not want it to end.

Once in a very long while comes along a book so magical that one wishes it would never end. How perfect that Alameddine's The Hakawaiti is such a book? The title refers to the practice of a school of Middle Eastern story tellers who would entertain, often appearing nightly but drawing a story out over years, people coming back again and again to hear the next part of the tale. From the first line Alamaddine demonstrates himself to an heir to this great tradition, giving the reader a comfort that they are in the hands of a master story teller. "Listen," he begins. "Allow me to be your god. Let me take you on a journey beyond imagining. Let me tell you a story." The narrative might sound complex in its description, but is executed so masterfully that one wants to weep. Alameddine tells the story of Osama, the modern Lebanese scion of a prominent family, returning home to wait by his father's death bed. Through this framing narrative, the reader is guided through all sorts of other stories, including the history of this particular family whose grandfather happened to be a Hakawati, Islamic adventure tales, stories of romance, stories of magic, stories of loss and joy. Some stories are short, lasting no more than a few paragraphs, while others are interwoven through the length of the narrative. Even these long stories digress into other stories, each adding another thread to what becomes a beautiful tapestry. Thus we are treated the story of Fatima, a clever capable slave who adventures across many lands encountering jinni and demons, the story of Baybar, a perfect chivalrous prince who fights evil and creates justice, and many more. Like many good stories these include twists, sex, violence, vivid characters, and much humor. I could go on and on urging you to read this book, but really the more I write, the more time that will pass before you sink your teeth into Alamedine's delicious feast of a book. Don't wait even a minute, there is a story waiting to be told. Listen.

The title says it all..

Hakawati means storyteller and that is what Rabih Alamenddine proves that he is with this book. It is a beautiful set of stories that are so entwined it is easy to forget who is the teller and who the characters. But ultimately it doesn't matter as it is the reader who gets wrapped up in myth, family history, and family myths. On a cultural and political level the importance of this novel is in the way that it elegantly demonstrates how the Middle-East is not a single culture, single religion, and single political outlook lacking nuance - even within the extended al Kharrat family these are expressed in so many different ways. The Hakawati demonstrates to us that there are always a myriad of different stories surrounding any subject, and truth and falsehood may be in the telling. The lesson is in the final word: Listen.

READ THIS BOOK, PLEASE

For those who seek to understand the bonds in famililes, this book is a find. There is nothing heroic or unusual about this family, their happenings and trials are the stuff of common lives. The portrait is honest and emotionally deep. Layered onto the story of this multigeneration family are the wild fables of Lebanon. In one moment you want to hear what happens to the family, the next you are totally absorbed in some wild tale. Tales emerge within tales to our delight. I haven't enjoyed a book this much in ages.

A Brilliant Saga of Four Generations

Alameddine, Rahib. "The Hakawati", Knopf, 2008. A Saga of Four Generations Amos Lassen Four generations of Arab life is the theme of Rahib Alameddine"s "The Hakawati". It is a mixture of folklore and historical drama that is a novel unlike any other I have read. Interwoven are five different narratives to give the story of a family in Beirut that has roots from the Druze, from the English and from Armenia. Stories beget stories just as families beget families and the union of Arabian folk stories and snippets from contemporary Lebanon is magic. Osama al-Kharrat, a Los Angeles software engineer, returns home to Lebanon in 2003 for the feast of Eid al-Hada. He begins to relate the family history and reaches back to his great-grandparents and his grandfather who was a Hakawati, a storyteller (who happened also to be gay). Cutting into the family's stories are stories from the Koran and the Bible, "The Arabian Nights", Shakespeare, Ovid and all those people who had ever spoken to the man who wrote this wonderful book. Osama has lived most of his adult life in California but when he returns to Lebanon to be with his dying father, he very quickly falls back into his extended family. It seems that the history of his family is very close to the folklore of its people and like Arabian folk tales it is replete with "jinnis" and "imps" some of which Alameddine summons up. Not only is the book enchanted but enchanting, it is important when we look at the crisis in the Middle East today. A better understanding of the people brings about a better understanding of what is transpiring in the hot bed of the modern world. "The Hakawati" is almost like letting a genie out of a bottle so we can hear the wonderful stories. There are stories for everyone and about everything--love and hate, adventure, families and generations, escape and information. The book is, quite simply, a heroic story and it is quite funny too. It is if the author has taken a brush in hand and painted the souls of his people for us. As I said before, I have never read anything quite like this before and the exuberance and the inventiveness make this book a sure to become classic. It is very easy to become enamored of what is written here as everything is so timeless and relevant. The language of the prose captures the eye and the mind and when you consider that the author has written this book in a language he has learned, it becomes all the more beautiful. As I reread what I have written here I must admit that I have heaped a great deal of praise on this book and I find myself thinking about my own biases toward the people of Lebanon. Having served in the Israeli army and having been stationed not far from the Lebanese border, I had quite a different idea of the Lebanese. I see now how narrow I was/am, and if for nothing else, Alameddine opened my eyes about Arab culture. But this is not what makes the book great. It is great because of what it has to say and because it was written by

Magus Alameddine

Rabih Alameddine's new novel, "The Hakawati," is a sprawling, delicious panoply of over-the-top tales of love, sex, murder, heroism, magic, loss, triumph, skulduggery, noblesse, repentance, lies, redemption, loyalty, curses, and just about everything else, all plaited into a set of parallel narratives which augment and illuminate each other. It is a masterful and startling accomplishment, a sort of literary maqam that twists and turns on recurrent themes and characters. The reader initially wonders how to relate all these seemingly unrelated stories, but quickly notices with growing awareness how they are really jazz riffs on single themes, embellishments that sear those themes into our consciousness so that we can't get them out of our heads. This is not the first time that Alameddine has used such literary structure. His first novel, "Koolaids," interlaced two parallel narratives, the worst years of the AIDS crisis and the civil war in Lebanon. There, as in "The Hakawati," the narratives resonated one with the other. And his second novel, "I, the Divine," an ingenious work all in first chapters of his narrator's never-to-be-completed memoir, managed to give us multiple perspectives on events told by a single character, much as The Hakawati gives us multiple views of universal themes that echo through very different tales. But whereas the two earlier works had some rough edges and unpolished facets, "The Hakawati" is a perfect gem, burnished, intricate, complex, and with every feature serving to magnify its brilliance and dazzle. Here is a writer who has grown into his initial promise, perhaps beyond it. It is easy to fall in love with the tales themselves; they are both currently relevant and timeless as well as entirely engrossing. The more discerning reader will also delight in the language of this book. Like other writers using English as a second language for their literary medium (Conrad and Nabokov come to mind), Alameddine is almost preternaturally aware of its sound and cadence, its semantic subtleties, its echos and reverberations of meanings. He is clearly besotted with English, and we follow him in a vertiginous trance like a whirling dervish, lost in the ecstasy of the moment. Alameddine is nothing short, it seems, of a literary magician, pulling our emotions out of his hat, our dreams from out his sleeve, and showing them to us in a way that forces us to see them anew. This novel is a masterpiece, unlike anything I've ever read before or ever hope to read again.