A gay Yemeni living in San Francisco in the 1990s checks himself into a psychiatric clinic having lost too many friends and his lover to AIDS. In the meantime Satan is interviewing Death and the saints known as the Fourteen Holy Helpers about him.

I wanted to like this book and kept thinking it was on the verge of becoming something really good but a third of the way through I have to admit it's just not happening for me. DNF. ( )

2.5

this book had such a strong start, at one point i was gonna give it 4 stars until it got too sexual then boring ( )

So, I know this book is written by an incredibly talented writer who won praise for this book and who other work I would like to read, but...I just couldn't get into it. I struggled to follow the story and I should have realized sooner that the author was using magical realism (not my favorite literary trend, ugh) with having Satan and Death as active characters and narrators in this story. There were moments when I could see the insights which win this author and genre praise from others, but I struggled with the book as whole. If this genre is your thing, I'm certain you would enjoy the book - but it's just not mine. ( )

This was a very rich and sweeping portrait of a writer named Jacob that takes places ostensibly over the course of a single night at a clinic where he goes to seek treatment for depression. It expands into a whole universe where Jacob's fate/soul is debated over by Satan (with the Islamic name of Iblis rather than the Christian name of Lucifer) vs. Death with the 14 Holy Helper Saints acting as character witnesses. In between the interviews and the scenes at the clinic we get samplings of Jacob's prose stories along with his poetry interspersed throughout. Jacob himself reminisces about his life and discusses points with Satan as well.

Jacob's struggles are his ongoing survivor guilt over the passing of his lover, named Doc and 5 of their mutual friends during the ravaging early years of HIV-AIDS in the 1980s gay community of America. This theme is captured especially well in the book's epigraphs esp. "We must forget in order to remain present, forget in order not to die, forget in order to remain faithful." from Marc Augé's "Oblivion". Though the book's situation is personal and unique it is still a universal struggle for all those who deal with loss and remembering & forgetting. I was very moved by the expressiveness of Alameddine's word art.

Reader's Tip
You will want to either keep a pencil or a dictionary/wikipedia handy while you are reading as there are few pages that go by without the use of or reference to uncommon words, pop culture, Greek mythology, Roman history etc. Some references still went over my head even after I had looked them up (e.g. pg. 76. Why does Thomas Friedman, a columnist for the New York Times, have a special place reserved for him in Hell? Is it due to some feud with Alameddine himself?). Despite the occasional frustration from these, I have no reservation about calling this a 5 out of 5.

#ThereIsAlwaysOne
pg. 8 "...but he'd been dead for a quite a while..."
Probably this was just meant as an affected manner of expression, but it had the same effect as a typo causing a break in the reading flow as you had to go back to check if that was what it really said. ( )

. I took a while to get into this, as one of the main characters is the Devil, and I can't say I go for that approach much. But then the book shifts to a waiting room in a psychiatric hospital. Meet Jacob, who has a complex history to tell, from Yemen to San Francisco, via a catholic boarding school, a civil war and the AIDS crisis. On the way, there are so many pop culture and poetry references that it's difficult to pick out just one or two favorites, and plenty of drugs at western foreign policy and the failure of the Arab Spring. I really recommend it. ( )