Cockroach by Rawi Hage

Rage.  Anger.  An all-consuming hatred for pretty much everything.  That's Rawi Hage's novel in a nutshell.

The obvious comparison is to Dostoevsky's Notes from the Underground, at least in the narrator's self-regard, if not the florid writing style.  

It's the immigrant story viewed through the sewers, the underground of society, where only cockroaches can dwell and survive.  It's not a story that will convince the average Joe (the Canadian Plumber) of the value of immigration.  The narrator is easy to despise - a sick, lying, jobless thief, addict, and seducer - not all easy to empathise with, despite his obvious problems. 

It's a novel for the young - in that only a young person, full of strident opinion and in search of something to hate, could fall in love with the misery that consumes the narrator. 

The contrast between Hage's narrator and Yann Martel's narrator in "Life of Pi" is striking.  Martel's Pi Patel is an optimist, clinging to hope despite great calamity, cleverly camouflaging his unreliability until the end.  Hage's creation is the resolute pessimist, clinging to despair, upfront in his lies.  

And then the cockroach gets a job as a busboy (hard to believe he keeps it), a girlfriend (harder to believe - does he even ever wash), and finally an all-too-convenient chance to avenge another's pain, to assuage his own guilty past.   A funnily contrived ending to a story of rage and hopelessness.  

In the end, the reader is unable to find anything redemptive about this tale of the underground.  The narrator is barely recognizable as human, as a socialized being - how can we possibly care?