The Hakawati

Rabih Alameddine

Signed 2008 1st Edition.

An astonishingly inventive, wonderfully exuberant novel that takes us from the shimmering dunes of Egypt to the war-torn streets of twenty-first-century Lebanon.

In 2003, Osama al-Kharrat returns to Beirut after many years in America to stand vigil at his father's deathbed.  The city is a shell of the Beirut Osama remembers, but he and his friends and family take solace in the things that have always sustained them; gossip, laughter, and, above all, stories.

Osama's grandfather was a hakawati, or storyteller, and his bewitching stories--of his arrival in Lebannon, an orphan of the Turkish wars, and of how he earned the name al-Kharrat, the fibster--are interwoven with classic tales of the Middle East, stunningly reimagined.  Here are Abraham and Isaac; Ishmael, father of the Arab tribes; the ancient, fabled Fatima; and Baybars, the slave prince who vanquished the Crusaders.  Here, too, are contemporary Lebanese whose stories tell a larger, heartbreaking tale of seemingly endless war--and of survival. 

Like a true hakawati, Rabih Alameddine has given us an Arabian Nights for this century--a funny, captivating novel that enchants and dazzles from its very first lines: "Listen.  Let me take you on a journey beyond imagining.  Let me tell you a story."