An extraordinary literary debut, this book is about the AIDS epidemic, the civil war in Beirut, death, sex, and the meaning of life. Daring in form as well as content, Koolaids turns the traditional novel inside out and hangs it on the clothesline to air.

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Library Journal

Alameddine is a respected painter who brings great visual skill to his first literary work. The novel is really an effectively conceived collage of the viewpoints of several characters: Samia is a Lebanese woman crisscrossing east and west Beirut during its darkest days, Mark is an HIV-positive American who faces his own end while mourning the steady loss of friends during the worst years of the AIDS plague, and Mohammed is a belligerent and misunderstood painter who tries to give form and meaning to it all, just as the author means to do through his fiction. War, death, sex in a morally empty and meaningless world when mixed on Alameddine's palette, they make for fascinating reading. To make his point, Alameddine freely cites thinkers whose takes on life and death he finds laughably wanting. He also includes news reports which, when juxtaposed with the situations of his characters, makes us see by just how far those not living the horror can miss the truth. Immediate, pitched, and frightening to read, this work is recommended for larger public and academic libraries. Roger W. Durbin, Univ. of Akron, OH

This emotionally charged first novel by a Lebanese-American writer and artist is an impressionistic collage that skillfully juxtaposes its gay protagonists' defiant encounters with AIDS, the embattled recent history of Lebanon during its own civil war and "the Israeli siege of Beirut," and more general permutations of estrangement from society, family, and nation. Alameddine's characters (who are, unfortunately, not always clearly distinguished) include a Lebanese matriarch whose diary records the sufferings of her kindred throughout a 30-year span of political turmoil, several variously involved San Franciscans during that city's own plague years, and, most crucially, a painter whose garishly violent canvases are calculated distortions of his Lebanese homeland's chaotic past and present. The "novel" assembles summaries of that history together with journal excerpts, letters, poems, discursive statements often framed as aphorisms ("in America, I fit, but I do not belong. In Lebanon, I belong, but I do not fit"), and aborted literary works. If we're occasionally unsure whoþs speaking (or being addressed), there's no mistaking the book's furious argumentative energy here—whether its scattershot wit takes the form of mocking allusions to the biblical Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse; a rudely satirical playlet whose characters include Eleanor Roosevelt, Krishnamurti, Julio Cortaz, and (a probably gay) Tom Cruise; imaginary conversations with eminent writers (Borges, Coover, and Updike among them); or parodies whose subjects range from Middle Eastern scriptures to American movies and TV shows (one of "The Waltons" is particularly droll). Alameddine stumbles when fulminatingnakedly against American materialism and heterosexual hypocrisy—yet some of his baldest declarations are among his finer effects (for example, an HIV-positive protagonist's lament that "nothing in my life is up to me"). A wildly uneven, but powerful and original portrayal of cultural and sexual displacement, alienation, and—in its admirably gritty way—pride.

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Eschewing conventional narrative for the sake of formal invention, Alameddine has structured “Koolaids” so that its form issues from the emotions of the characters, rather than from any author imposed linear narrative. Told in a series of loosely connected voices and incidents, the novels centers, in part, on a group of friends and families in Beirut whose lives are profoundly altered – and sometimes lost – in a region decimated by civil war and torn apart by religion.

Here we meet characters such as Samia, who falls in love with a man from East Beirut who must murder her husband, and Sylvie and Amal, an “impeccably accessorized” Beirut couple whose Paris café gossip Alameddine uses to illustrate the deep psychological effects of Lebanese religions and social classes.

“Koolaids” situates itself in the San Francisco art world as well, where we encounter characters like Kurt, an American who outlives all his friends as they die of AIDS, and Samir, a Lebanese immigrant whose homosexuality has caused him to flee Beirut.

Here we also meet the focal personality of the novel, a socially inscrutable and difficult Lebanese expatriate painter named Mohammed, whose paintings captivate Americans.  Only people from Lebanon, however, see them for what they are: abstract representations of Beirut’s living nightmare.  Mohammed’s voice provides the moral gravity that holds this constellation of Americans and Lebanese together.

To tell their stories, Alameddine has constructed a collage that integrates every genre under the sun: fictional diary entries by a Lebanese mother, real AP news stories, Internet news-group postings, soliloquies, hallucinations and short plays (the latter performed by the likes of Julio Cortazar, Eleanor Roosevelt and Tom Cruise, “who looks a little lost”). More often than not, these fragments are violent or sexually explicit, yet they’re always beautiful in their hard, lyrical insistence on the material reality of the terror of our century.

“Koolaids” is free of ideology and “spiritual” mumbo-jumbo, and goes beyond pessimism, post-modern posings on “textuality,” or the cult of the victim.  It is, instead, a tough, funny, heart-breaking book.

But it can be heavy-handed sometimes in implying too obviously what a given scene is trying to do.  Also, the relationship between AIDS and the Beirut situation isn’t clear and can feel arbitrary – although it may be Alameddine’s point that simultaneous disasters don’t always possess underlying connections.

These problems aside, “Koolaids” deserves a wide readership, especially in the U.S., where most people are ignorant of Lebanese conflicts and indifferent to the effect of AIDS.  This devastating debut novel accomplishes the tough job of keeping a non-linear narrative cohesive, at the same time that it reminds us of the crucial relevance of two types of history: international events, and the ones that happen under our noses.

The book insists on the connections between both, and it does so with a dark, comic sensibility that razes provincial self-importance. 

“Koolaids” is a Jeremiad for the 1990s.  I hope Alameddine moonlights from his canvases again.

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The Independent (London)

‘Death is never very far away in Rabih Alameddine’s unsettling first novel about the impact of Aids and the Lebanese civil war on a circle of friends and family.  Told in a series of fragmented snatches - letters, diaries, news wire stories and dreams, the book’s narrator switches between memories of a Seventies childhood in sophisticated, but bombed to pieces Beirut, and his new life as an acclaimed abstract artist in liberated San Francisco. When Mohammed contracts Aids, it seems he has just exchanged one over-complicated existence for another.  It’s a relief when the four horses of the Apocalypse finally ride into view.  A moving and angry book.’

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Of Love and War
Aamer Hussein
Times Literary Supplement 3/12/98

In Washington, DC, Samir, a Lebanese, goes to the opening of an exhibition by his famous compatriot, Mohammad.  Informed by an American of the abstract intent of a striking series, Samir rapidly rids him of his delusions; the artist has merely depicted the sides of houses with their yellow stones captured in different light conditions.  Mohammad, by turning the gallery into a Lebanese village, is telling the story of every Lebanese village, Druze, Christian, or Muslim, the story of his own home: “He had captured Lebanon.”  This is what Rabih Alameddine, a successful Lebanese expatriate painter, has done, by excavating many layers of his homeland’s complex recent history, in Koolaids, an ambitious though relatively brief first novel.  Shrugging off fiction’s stiffer conventions, he uses every device at his disposal to make visible to the reader his tortured---yet strangely beautiful---world, in which civil war, religious antagonism, fatal desires and the onslaught of disease are illuminated by flashes of love, just as the stone walls in Mohammad’s village paintings are lit by Lebanon’s sunlight. 

Mohammad’s and Samir’s perspectives---often virtually interchangeable---seem at times to be the novel’s twinned centre of consciousness.  But points of view are multiple in Alameddine’s often visionary, occasionally diffuse but ultimately circular, structure.  Mohammad begins the book.  His laconic, lyrical tones seem echoes of the author’s.  An exile, he seeks a homeland on canvas. Yet he is, like his paintings, paradoxically rooted.  He dreams in Arabic.  His namesake, the prophet, leaves space for Jesus and Krishna in his mind.  He opens with a parable which recurs through the book.  The Four Horsemen of the apocalypse come to visit him; while three accept him for his knowledge of war, plague and death, he is rejected by the fourth, who rides a white horse, because of his homosexuality and his Muslim faith.

We are cast back, immediately, to 1976 and the journal of Samir’s mother, who is a Druze.  She reflects Mohammad’s agonies.  Her account of the civil war and the state of siege in which she lives, exiled in her own land, echoes Mohammad’s narrative, which is interlaces with those of the dying in the AIDS wards.  Later, their lives draw together from a distance, when Samir, now Mohammad’s friend, dies.  By this point, several other voices and ways of telling have knotted the proceedings.

Alameddine finds grim humour in each community’s bid for supremacy and claims of ethnic purity in Lebanon; he ransacks the mainstream media and obscure texts alike for material to fuel his scorn.  Bigots among Maronites and Shia Muslims are denounced.  His anger crosses the border to Israel, Syria and the international peace-broking trouble-makers.  But rather than polemicize, he exposes the ridiculousness of propaganda by juxtaposing it with other texts, both risible and serious.  Throughout the book, however, the hand of peace is held out.  A third Lebanese voice, that of Makram, the child of a Christian father and Sunni mother, pleads the wasted cause of Lebanon’s erstwhile tolerant, pluralist and neighbourly societies.  Samir’s sister, Joumana, and Mohammad’s sister, Nawal, generous survivors, proffer the salt of Lebanon’s earth.

Alameddine excels at pitting art against the Goliath of destruction.  But the California gay voices he includes in the name of representation, lack the humour, and the poignancy, of his Lebanese accents.  Likewise, the righteous use of characters as emblems of Lebanon’s warring communities and the subliminal unities between them is unnecessary for a writer of such sophisticated audacity.  But audacity also gives Koolaids its sombre yet dazzling richness of texture.  Alameddine is strongest on home ground, proliferating stories on the periphery.  The best tells of the affair of the adulterous leader of the Lebanese forces and his paramour who are found with their legs entwined and their bodies riddled with fifty-two bullets.  “Death”, as the paler rider who finally embraces Mohammad well knows, “comes in many shapes and sizes, but it always comes.”

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A book that refuses despair by the sheer exuberance and inventiveness of its style.  The topics may seem gloomy---the impact of the Aids epidemic and the Lebanese civil war on a circle of family and friends---but the marvelous, experimental assault on the text makes it a joyous read.  Through newspaper clippings, short bits of drama, recorded conversations, cod philosophy, it tells the story of a group of unraveled individuals in unraveling times.  They live their lives by junk media, while dodging Beirut bullets and looking for the next medication shot.

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What People Are Saying

Rabih Alameddine’s 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. (Where else does Krishnamurti meet Eleanor Roosevelt and Tom Cruise?)  Like Zen koans, KOOLAIDS issues pronouncements while pointing out the absurdities of any kind of truth.  It contemplates the meaning of death while redefining the meaninglessness of life.  It looks at the great cycle of history, destiny, and literature and puts them on spin and recycle.  This is an absolutely brilliant book -- daring in its somersault of literary feats and allusions, an antidote for anyone who suffers from the blahs or an excess of self-satisfaction.  I hope it’s widely read.  Just think of the fascinating dinner conversations and epitaphs it could spawn.  I think Kant, Jung, and Borges would approve. --Amy Tan

This is a fantastic novel that every American should read.  Now that heterosexual culture has seized on AIDS and banalized it with artifice like Rent and Philadelphia, and gay writers flee because of the unpalatability of the truths that make up the crisis, Rabih Alameddine has courageously and ingeniously reinvigorated the subject.  His writing is all rough edges, like the experiences he documents: AIDS, the war in Lebanon, art-making, familial homophobia, homosexual sex, love, romance, friendship.  In an era in which the most conventional yuppie fiction rooted in suburban angst is being passed off as The New American Literature, Alameddine shows how formal invention can derive organically from the emotions of the experiences at stake, and not glib device.  KOOLAIDS communicates with crystal clarity because the content reflects the need for justice.  This is the kind of writing that can transform American culture; it exposes how dominance is constructed instead of replicating dominance.  This novel is the product of the fully examined self in a context of an increasingly conformist society.--Sarah Schulman

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