A review by archytas
Koolaids: The Art of War by Rabih Alameddine

challenging emotional reflective slow-paced

• Plot- or character-driven? Character
• Strong character development? Yes
• Loveable characters? Yes
• Diverse cast of characters? Yes
• Flaws of characters a main focus? It's complicated

5.0

I finished this book this morning, and had this sense all day that the world was a little better, richer, more sharply coloured: occasionally I would forget that this was not everyone's experience, they hadn't all just read a truly great book, and given it was published 25 years ago, not terribly likely any of them had read it recently.
It isn't a simple read. I got halfway through and decided to stop and start again, for starters. I realised I hadn't been paying enough attention, didn't have my cast straight, had been confusing characters based on superficial similarities. It may have been that I am a particularly sloppy reader, but it also felt as if this was partially deliberate: this is a book which rewards your attention and quietly asks you to question your own complicity in what you don't look at.
On the whole, it is not a quiet book. There is a ferocity to the writing: Alameddine is very, very angry - but his anger does not simplify or blunt the delicacy of the stories here. It is an anger underpinned by sorrow and exhaustion and grief. These characters most of all demand to be seen, and when you do see them, they reward you with laughter and warmth and survival and passion. These are characters who hold rescue friends from a collapsing bomb site, but can't accept their gay son until he too is dying. They are gay men whose casual racism jostles with emotional support. There is culture, and connection and the determination to live in the face of so much death.
The book deals with both the war in Lebanon and the AIDS epidemic in the USA in the 1980s and 1990s. Similarities and differences resonate through the experiences in Lebanon and San Francisco. But the book is doing far more than playing these as contrasting notes: it is building a story about how worlds are abandoned and forgotten, flattened into anecdote or a tut-tut for a distant tragedy. One of my favourite passages includes an attempt at a failed play, a dialogue between two upper class Lebanese women - one living in Paris, one visiting from Beirut. These women gossip glibly about the war and the AIDS epidemic, neither of which appears to have deeply touched their ivory tower lives. Yet these women - the sophisticates of Beirut - are in turn erased by a war narrative that portrays their homeland as a hotbed of terrorism, barbarity and chaos. Another thread explores the emptiness of how the US engages with other cultures, without denigrating the cultural contribution of that community:
"Most of the art critics who reviewed his work were not Lebanese. I felt they missed quite a bit in his paintings. I learned a thousand and one new things about his painting from their writing, yet they never asked what we saw
The book is vignette-based, from a group of interconnected characters, some of whom have dementia. This allows a huge amount of content - ideas, characterisation, commentary - to be crammed in without much need for exposition or plot beats. Some passages read like news extracts, some are trippy dreams, many are savagely funny quips. But as I started with, it also rewards persistence, the whole weaves not only into stories about those we forget, but also into a story about how we remember, connect and create communities. If these are not seen by Reagan or the media, they are no less rich and integrated. This is at heart a story about people who love, and how fierce and rewarding that love is, even under fire and pestilence. It is a reminder perhaps that what matters is not always survival, but how we impact each other.

"In America, I fit, but I do not belong. In Lebanon, I belong, but I do not fit."