Osama tells stories to keep his father, his patriarch, alive the book's 513 pages take place over a few days, elongating the last breaths of Osama's father. Exile becomes a central theme for the rest of the book. “I was a tourist in a bizarre land,” he says, “I was home.” In the first three pages of his novel, Alameddine mentions the magic, foreignness, and pull of home-and the idea of belonging. Osama feels foreign to himself in Lebanon. to stand vigil at his father's hospital bedside. First to follow is Osama al-Kharrat, the narrator of the book, who has come back to Lebanon after a long self-imposed exile in L.A. And thus the novel launches its first character on an intricate, sometimes deadly, and always absorbing adventure, and the rest of the cast follows Fatima's example. When the emir asks why the healer can't come to him, Fatima says healers never leave home, because home is the source of their magic. In order to help her emir produce a son, Fatima offers to travel back to Egypt to visit a healer. More than three quarters of the way into the novel, Alameddine writes, “The best stories always begin with the appearance of a woman.” He follows his own advice, opening his novel centuries in the past with Fatima, the Alexandrian.
The main pleasure derived from these snaking, hooked fables is in the very moment of reading them. Like the Nights, The Hakawati is told as stories within stories, and so florid and entangled are the stories that now, looking back, it's sometimes hard for me to disentangle many of them. In his acknowledgments, Alameddine mentions the many sources that inspired his retellings, among them The Iliad, Kalila wa Dimna, The Letters of Abelard and Heloise, Flowers from a Persian Garden, Italo Calvino's Italian Folktales, and, most prominently, A Thousand and One Nights. The Hakawati's beautiful nested stories are rooted in Arabic and Indo-Persian folktales, as well as biblical stories and Western folk traditions. I was struck initially by the book's title, the Arabic word for “storyteller.” It seems to be the first time a novel has come out from a major press with an Arabic title moreover, the title is practically buoyant on the cover. Rabih Alameddine has spun a honeycomb of fable, family history, and Lebanese lore in his newest novel, The Hakawati.
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