The Angel of History
Subtitle: a novel
By: Rabih Alameddine
Edition: First edition.
Publisher: Atlantic Monthly Press
Published: 2016
Language: eng
Format: Hardcover
Number of pages: 294
ISBN-13: 9780802125767
Subjects: Poets; Devil; AIDS (Disease); Gay men; Death (Personification); Recluses; Yemenis; Fiction
Description: The Angel of History follows Yemeni-born poet Jacob as he revisits the events of his life, from his maternal upbringing in an Egyptian whorehouse to his adolescence under the aegis of his wealthy father and his life as a gay Arab man in San Francisco at the height of AIDS. Hovered over by the presence of alluring, sassy Satan who taunts Jacob to remember his painful past and dour, frigid Death who urges him to forget and give up on life, Jacob is also attended to by 14 saints. Set in Cairo and Beirut; Sana'a, Stockholm, and San Francisco; Alameddine gives us a charged philosophical portrait of a brilliant mind in crisis. This is a profound, philosophical and hilariously winning story of the war between memory and oblivion we wrestle with every day of our lives. "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"--

Yemeni-born poet Jacob revisits the events of his life, from his maternal upbringing in an Egyptian whorehouse to his adolescence under the aegis of his wealthy father and his life as a gay Arab man in San Francisco at the height of AIDS. Hovered over by the presence of alluring, sassy Satan who taunts Jacob to remember his painful past and dour, frigid Death who urges him to forget and give up on life, Jacob is also attended to by 14 saints.