wretchedness and exile in Montreal

De Niro's Game, the riveting Impac-winning debut novel by the Lebanese-born writer Rawi Hage, ended with its young hero, recently escaped from wartorn Beirut, wandering around Paris in a delirium of memories from his blood-spattered past and feverish stratagems to consolidate his precarious present. Cockroach, Hage's more capacious, ambitious second novel, takes exile as its point of departure, and reads almost as a sequel to the first.

Montreal replaces Paris as the city of refuge, but the unnamed hero is substantially the same figure: a small-time crook, haunted by similar memories, enmeshed in a similar world of émigré hustlers and desperadoes, afflicted by similarly elemental problems of survival, and unfolding his noirish tale of desire, vengeance and redemption in the same strikingly idiosyncratic style, at once hard-boiled and hallucinatory, like that of some hoodlum-visionary freshly disembarked from Rimbaud's Drunken Boat.