![]() ![]() ![]() It is 2003, and the patriarch of the al-Kharrat family is dying in a Beirut hospital. That saga often comes as a relief when the reader is up against the novel's meandering, almost equally long tales of Fatima and Baybars. This part of the novel is the most effective and directly told, even though it presents us with a family history to rival the chronicles of the BuendÃas or Sutpens. At the center of the novel is the family saga of Osama al-Kharrat, who after 26 years in Los Angeles has returned to his roots in Lebanon to stand vigil at his father's deathbed. ![]() "The Hakawati" is made up of many stories, and like Scheherazade's famous nights, it is intended to keep death at bay, while in serpentine fashion resurrecting the world in words with each day's dawn. This is the work of the hakawati, the storyteller: merging the mundane and the fabulous. Listen, for you may miss something listen, the story is about to change listen and, as the author states, "allow me to be your god." This is the stuff of the day-to-day becoming extraordinary. ![]() That appeal for our individual attention, and the broader plea for an audience, bookends Rabih Alameddine's bravely ambitious and often unwieldy novel, "The Hakawati." That single word serves both as a ritualistic call to prayer to those who love a good story and a renunciation of preconceptions about what that story may contain or mean. ![]()
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