A provocative first collection of stories by the author of Koolaids

Following the publication of his critically acclaimed first novel, Koolaids, Rabih Alameddine offers a collection of stories that explores the experience of a number of Lebanese characters - men and women, gay and straight--whose lives have been blown apart by a disastrous civil war and the resulting international diaspora. Daring in style as well as content, these tales explore the relationships that anchor our hearts to the world -- father and son, grandson and grandmother, pedophile and 12-year-old boy, young man and woman of the streets, sister and sister, daughter and father, gay man and heterosexual, the quick and their dead.

Suffused by a yearning for what has been lost, these narratives are both experimental and traditional, humorous and disturbing, and confirm without doubt that Alemeddine is one of the most original and accomplished young writers to emerge in some time.

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Publishers Weekly

The arresting title of this first collection from the author of the well-received novel Koolaids should not turn away readers who might discover Alameddine's considerable talents. Indeed, the eponymous novella seems purposely confrontational. The unnamed narrator, a gay man obviously dying of AIDS, corresponds with a pedophile named Bill. The dying man pretends to be a 13-year-old boy who has moved to San Francisco from Lebanon, and his letters are deliberately framed to encourage Bill's sexual cravings. The question that the story explicitly raises is the true nature of perversion: the narrator maintains that society at large is more perverted than the people it accuses of sexual transgression. He addresses the reader directly: "Do you ever think about what made me the way I am? You did." The remaining seven stories are equally edgy, acerbic and unsparing. Lebanon's proverbial breakdown is the black margin around everyone, whether the characters live in that country or have emigrated elsewhere. "The Changing Room" is an elegant, scathing memoir of an upper-class Lebanese boy sent off to an English boarding school in the '70s. While his country is falling into ruin, the boy moves from a war zone "directly into hell. Nothing prepared me for the cruelty of the English." The memoirist's vein is further pursued in "My Grandmother, the Grandmaster," in which an expatriated Lebanese writer recalls the role his mother's mother has played in his life, encouraging his intellectual talents that are derided by his rich but boorish father. She is a grande dame from an impeccable family line, but her genius in chess symbolizes the paradox of sexist Lebanon, where the chess association will not grant her recognition. The story displays the manners and mores of a ruling class on the brink of the abyss. These stinging narratives vibrate with an electrical tension that comes partly from Alameddine's penchant for the outrageous, partly from his unflinching view of a society in chaos.

Copyright 1999 Cahners Business Information.

The Lebanese-born author of Koolaids presents a thematically related collection of blunt, discomforting stories set largely in a Lebanese diaspora whose people reel from civil war and their own inability to find connection and peace. Several of the stories scrutinize the loneliness and anxiety of being gay in a disapproving community and in the continuing era of AIDS; "Duck" is an imaginative, nearly poetic series of fragments connecting a lover's slow death, a childhood duck hunt, a musing on suicide, and a Daffy Duck cartoon, while "The Changing Room" recounts life among outcasts in an English boarding school at a time of tragedy. The most spirited, triumphant story, "My Grandmother, the Grandmaster," recalls a chess match attended by the young narrator and his wily grandmother, who would become the only family member not to shun the narrator later in life. The long title story tells of a desperate sexual correspondence between a middle-aged man and a pubescent boy, at least one of whom is not as he seems. It is a confrontational introduction to a demanding but impressive book. For larger and specialized collections.--Janet Ingraham Dwyer, Columbus, OH Copyright 1999 Cahners Business Information.

A first collection of loosely related stories and a title novella, from the Lebanese-born author of Koolaids (1998). The seven briefer stories, which seem to be partially autobiographical, depict—usually in discrete fragments arranged in nonsequential paragraphs—the experience of growing up in a volatile country with extreme social and ethnic contrasts and riven by civil war; and the experience of various "escapes" from parental expectations as well as more immediate dangers. The typical protagonist here is a sensitive outsider lost in the world of books and enduring complex relationships with such imposing loved ones as "My Grandmother, the Grandmaster" (a story where a chess match assumes clever symbolic importance) or with a once-beloved cousin ("Remembering Nasser") who disapproved of his homosexuality. Sexual confusion and guilt are paramount in several pieces ("Duck" and "A Flight to Paris") that mourn the loss of a lover to AIDS, and especially in "The Changing Room," a tense account of a wary Lebanese boy's experiences in an English boarding school. The centerpiece—and most troubling story here—is The Perv, a self-justifying pedophile's nauseatingly explicit account of his correspondence with a nubile (Lebanese-American) boy enjoyably exploring his own gayness. Or is this only the fantasy of an aging recluse (who may be a patient in a hospital or sanatorium), comforting and exciting himself with the particulars of imaginary passions ("I have always been someone else, always")? Alameddine skillfully juggles several possibilities in a deeply confrontational fiction that hauls the reader headlong into intimate contact with a defiantly unconventional sensibility. Despite some monotony, this is a vivid and interesting further exploration of Alameddine's uniquely multinational, multisexual fiction. It's not a likable book, but it's one that the reader does come to respect.

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The Seattle Times-Post Intelligencer

‘The Perv’ offers challenging reading, difficult lesson
By Greg Burkman

If your idea of fiction requires that it simply entertain and lull you, or provide a passing distraction between appointments, you’d be advised to steer clear of Rabih Alameddine’s new collection of short stories, “The Perv.”

If, on the other hand, you favor literature that challenges you down to your conscience, then you really must read this book.

The stories in “The Perv” are characterized by the various forms alienation can take within societies riven by oppression and chaos.  For example, the deeply disturbing title story centers on an anonymous narrator who corresponds by mail to a pedophile named Bill.  The narrator, a shut-in who is dying of AIDS, poses as a 13-year-old boy from Lebanon who has moved to San Francisco, and he purposely frames his letters to play on Bill’s sexual obsessions.  The hard lesson of the story for the reader is put best by the narrator himself, when he addresses us all: “Do you ever think what made me the way I am?  You did.”

The other seven stories are just as troubling and unsparing.  “The Changing Room,” for instance, provides a savage look at racism and homophobia through the eyes of a well-to-do, gay Lebanese boy shipped off to an English boarding school in the 1970s.  Even though his parents send away to avoid the war that is tearing Lebanon apart, it’s difficult for him – and for us – to tell which country is worse: the boy’s life in England is “. . . hell. Nothing prepared me for the cruelty of the English” against him and the other dark-skinned students to whom the English boys refer hatefully as “wogs,” and “chimney sweepers.”

More rigorous that Alameddine’s debut novel, last year’s critically acclaimed “Koolaids,” “The Perv” provides a painful, bitingly electric experience for the reader, as well as a credible and necessary look into the thoughts and feelings of people rendered outcasts by forms of social cruelty.

For those not familiar with this experience, the book is a must.  Though at times brutally frank and lacerating in its depictions of cultural and social oppressions, the collection is gracefully written: sharp, direct and elegant without ranting, arch condemnation. 

“The Perv,” despite its title, with its lamely subversive feel, faces four of the big truths – sickness, desire, alienation and death – with a caustic honesty as sincere as Jonathan Swift’s or Lenny Bruce’s.  And, like Swift and Bruce, the cumulative effect of these stories transcends gay/straight, foreign/domestic and all of these structural limitations of the ways we think. 

The book is ultimately an affirmation of the tough resilience of alienated people, as well as the hard wake-up call to the people who have no clue about them: Watch your back; you may have created a beautifully coherent nightmare. 

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The Psychology of Predation

The Perv Artfully Blends Genres
by Matthew Stadler in The Stranger

 Rabih Alameddine's THE PERV is an excellent book of stories which has received no notice in any newspaper or magazine (perhaps because Hollywood junkie Jerry Stahl has just published a novel also called Perv).  Alameddine is a painter as well as the author of a novel, KOOLAIDS: The Art of War.  His new collection of stories, THE PERV, displays a pattern of formal experimentation more typical of painters than of authors -- while extremely various in form and structure, the eight stories in this collection share a sensibility and a palette.  They return again and again to the same subjects (Lebanon, displacement, bigotry, AIDS, the burden of memory) and the same emotions (primarily peevishness and longing) even as the author's narrative strategies shift.  Several stories employ the conventions of memoir -- chronological recollections told with the irony and omniscience gained with time -- while others are simply collaged fragments of first-person observations, memories, and documents blending disparate times and incidents.

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What People Are Saying

"By turns raunchy and heartbreaking, The Perv is a bold and startlingly original collection that defies categorization. Filled with loss and hope, humor and redemption, these stories make you laugh despite yourself. Alameddine is a writer of astonishing gifts; his prose is at once lyrical and heartbreaking in its directness. An audacious debut collection that should establish him as one of the finest--and most wicked--writers of our time." --Laurie Foos, author of Ex Utero and Portrait of the Walrus by a Young Artist

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