The Hakawati

Rabih Alameddine is a modern-day Scheherazade, spinning out 1,001 nights’ worth of entertainment in this remarkable book, which is part fable, part memoir, and part family history.

Alameddine calls The Hakawati “a story”, which in itself blurs the line between fact and fiction. How much of it we should take for gospel is moot, for although the book includes as astute an analysis of Lebanon and its troubles as you’ll find, it’s also narrated by a young man named Osama al-Kharrat. That’s “Osama the Liar”, according to Alameddine. (Note, though, that the on-line dictionaries I’ve consulted don’t seem to recognize the Arabic term.)

Compounding our confusion is that al-Kharrat seems to bear a marked resemblance to his creator. Both were born in Lebanon and educated in the United States, and they share an artistic temperament. Alameddine paints when he’s not writing fiction; al-Kharrat is in line to inherit the family’s Toyota dealership, but would rather noodle on the guitar. Hmmm.

Clearly, the best approach to this collection of complexities is to take it as a fabulous amusement. What else can one make of a book that jumps from the bedside of the narrator’s dying father to intricate tales of Baybars and Fatima, legendary figures from the early days of the Arab world?

In each instance, Alameddine’s language is perfectly formed: al-Kharrat’s diaristic observations paint a believable picture of a conflicted, urbane Middle Easterner; the slave-prince Baybars’s triumph over the Crusaders is told in stirring, martial prose; and Fatima’s adventures take us into the realm of puckish fantasy, thanks to her eight prancing imps and the author’s spangled phrasing.

A hakawati, by the way, is a traditional Middle Eastern storyteller, and although Alameddine’s saga involves some decidedly postmodern twists, this San Francisco–based writer is clearly a master of that ancient craft. It takes some time for his various threads to coalesce, but once they start to spin in sync, the result is entrancing.