Satan plays the lead role, urging Jacob to remember his past, while Death – dour, languid and uninterested – would have him forget (“Death can ruin everything with a single touch. Meanwhile, in Jacob’s apartment and with his cat Behemoth for company, Satan and Death perform an intellectual duel if not for Jacob’s soul, then for his sanity. The novel is framed around the single night he spends in the waiting room.
The Angel of History tells the story of Jacob, a gay, Yemeni-born poet living in San Francisco, as he waits to check into a mental health facility sometime in the present day. For his new book Alameddine returns to this highly successful combination of a realist narrative with epic chronicling. The voice of Alameddine’s hakawati was arch, often camp, terrifying and emotive.
In his last but one novel, The Hakawati, Alameddine married the epic tales of the Arabic professional storyteller (the “hakawati”) with a story of familial relations, as a brother and his sister keep vigil by their dying father’s side. San Francisco was the heart of the Aids epidemic and is the setting for Rabih Alameddine’s moving new book, which looks back from the present to the 1980s, when the epidemic was at its height. It was called the Kaposi’s Sarcoma Foundation, after the telltale lesions that appeared on the skin of those infected with HIV. The centre didn’t use the terms Aids or HIV, because the disease didn’t yet have a name. I n 1982 the first Aids centre and helpline was opened in San Francisco to help disseminate advice among the district’s gay community about a strange emerging disease.
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