Koolaids
On sale
5th August 1999
Price: £16.99
Selected:
Paperback / ISBN-13: 9780349110615
‘Rabih Alameddine is one rare writer who not only breaks our hearts but gives every broken piece a new life’ Yiyun Li
‘Rabih Alameddine is one our most daring writers – daring not in the cheap sense of lurid or racy, but as a surgeon, a philosopher, an explorer, or a dancer’ Michael Chabon
Detailing the impact of the AIDS epidemic and the Lebanese civil war in Beirut on a circle of friends and family during the eighties and nineties, Koolaids mines the chaos of contemporary experience, telling the stories of characters who can no longer love or think except in fragments. Clips, quips, vignettes and hallucinations, tragic news reports and hilarious short plays, conversations with both the quick and the dead, all shine their combined lights to reveal the way we experience life today in this ambitious debut from bestselling and acclaimed author Rabih Alameddine.
‘Daring, dazzling . . . a tough, funny, heart-breaking book’ Seattle Times
‘Rabih Alameddine is one our most daring writers – daring not in the cheap sense of lurid or racy, but as a surgeon, a philosopher, an explorer, or a dancer’ Michael Chabon
Detailing the impact of the AIDS epidemic and the Lebanese civil war in Beirut on a circle of friends and family during the eighties and nineties, Koolaids mines the chaos of contemporary experience, telling the stories of characters who can no longer love or think except in fragments. Clips, quips, vignettes and hallucinations, tragic news reports and hilarious short plays, conversations with both the quick and the dead, all shine their combined lights to reveal the way we experience life today in this ambitious debut from bestselling and acclaimed author Rabih Alameddine.
‘Daring, dazzling . . . a tough, funny, heart-breaking book’ Seattle Times
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Reviews
Koolaids is the companion guide to The Tibetan Book of the Dead, The Diary of Anne Frank and the history of the world. It is hysterical in both senses. hilarious and loudly disturbing ... daring in its somersault of literary feats and allusions, an antidote to anyone who suffers from the blahs or an excess of self-satisfaction. I hope its widely read. Just think of the fascinating dinner conversations and epitahs it could spawn. I think Kant, June and Borges would approve
Hyperactive and apocalyptic - a lesson in how to mix a war zone (Beirut), sex (AIDS) and destruction (the Grim Reaper) and come up laughing
Excellent ... Alameddine can be so funny. Wit, of course can be used to devastating effect when highlighting iniquity and tragedy and this is done here with great mastery. Koolaids transcends the ubiquity of AIDS as a subject, to become a much wider and more universal meditation on the vagaries of life (and death)
A wildly imaginative tour de force - impressive, stunning
A moving and angry book
In its unflinching refusal to bury the darkness with its postmodernist pyrotechnics, it is a camera obscura in which our miserable century can view the dumbshow of its cruel procession. This book is not to be missed.