Carnival

"The son of a trapeze artist and an itinerant carpet merchant, a circus orphan raised by a Bearded Lady, Fly, as the protagonist of Carnival is known, is the ultimate outsider, even before the demise of the circus precipitates emigration."

"Taking the pragmatic view, Fly’s story is all too familiar — an essentially decent soul, and one possessed, it must be said, of a remarkable, gentle dignity, but isolated and relegated to the fringes of society by mental illness.  And yet, there is something compelling about Fly, that defies classification and dismissal, something revelatory in a Quixote-esque fashion.  Perhaps it is that he does witness, and in many matters, large and small, rectify.  It is Fly who protects the dignity of the Bearded Lady, when she dies, who extracts fair wages for fair work, both for himself and for others, from drunken boors with the ferocity of an avenging god, who feeds lost souls, who helps a customer escape her abusive husband (although, in the end, he can not save her from the church) and who catches Otto, brave warrior in the fight for truth and justice, when he falls. Perhaps it is because his incantations are infused with great force, beauty and historic sweep,  and because he speaks truth to power, fearlessly."

"Fly identifies and voices the reader’s inner outrage provoked by the basic injustices of life– one which, in everyday life, seems to be more often buried and denied than acted upon, perhaps out of a sense of futility."

"Hage’s writing has, in the past, been preoccupied with issues of war, isolation, alienation and the immigrant experience, his style noted for its juxtaposition of workaday prose with intense, incantatory passages.  These qualities continue in evidence in Carnival. There is a haunting sense of restless and sad impermanence, which infuses book from the outset — a sort of distillation of the loss that occurs when connections to one’s homeland and culture are severed."

Excerpted from: http://kerryoncanlit.wordpress.com/recent-reviews/hage-rawi-carnival/