Rawi Hage, author of the critically acclaimed De Niro’s Game and Cockroach, celebrated the launch of his third novel, Carnival, at Centretown’s Octopus Books featuring an in-depth conversation with CBC’s Adrian Harewood.
Carnival, which Hage described at the event as his best work, is told from the perspective of Fly, a restless, perpetually pondering cab driver, raised in a circus by his mother, a trapeze artist.
The idea behind Carnival came about when a friend of Hage’s mentioned the word “carnivalesque” in conversation.
“I started with the image of a carnival. A carnival is chaotic but also it’s contained. Contained by season, contained by ritual,” Hage said. “But at the same time it’s also about movement.”
The aesthetics of a carnival are reflected in the novel’s structure. It reads much like a non-linear stream of consciousness, yet is broken up into five separate acts, which Hage says pays homage to Shakespearean plays and the spirit of a carnival.
Hage said he takes inspiration from the mundane and develops ideas from images and people around him, which Hage believes is due to his background in photography.
As Harewood explained, the visual aspect of Hage’s work is what makes it an intense read.
“It’s a very, kind of, visceral experience. It’s very vivid.”
“You feel as if you’re being bathed in images and being bathed in language.”
Elements of the novel and its nearly 50 characters are drawn in part from Hage’s own experiences as a cabdriver in Montreal.
In Carnival, as in real life, Hage describes taxi drivers as belonging to two clans.
There are those who wait for business to come to them, and there are those who drive around the city looking for costumers.
Both Fly and Hage belong to the later group.
“I couldn’t fathom the idea of waiting. So I just drove endlessly. It’s two methods, and I think it’s two ways of looking at things,” Hage said.
The theme of bohemian mentality, and the lack of security it imposes, is laced into much of the story.
Hage told Harewood and attendees of the book launch that during his career as a cabdriver, a friend advised him not to carry a gun or knife for protection.
Instead he was told to carry a screwdriver with a discretely sharpened point and a feather duster with a wooden handle.
This snapshot in Hage’s life made its way into Carnival, with Fly taking the same precautions as he travels the rough streets of a dark, unnamed city always in flux
Carnival, is inherently political with its tales of poverty, crime, and social divisions.
According to Lisa Greaves, owner of Octopus Books, the politics soaked into Hage’s writing is what makes both the novel, and the novelist, worth celebrating.
“He talks about class issues and race issues in a way that a lot of people aren’t. Those are the things that are really important to us,” Greaves said.
“Hopefully we’re celebrating the word, hopefully we are celebrating the act of story-telling,” Harewood said.
“I think it’s very revitalizing meeting in these kinds of spaces with people who are interested in art.”
