The Storyteller, Or, the Hakawati by Rabih Alameddine

I don’t plot anywhere but in my head-no outlines, corkboards, or graphs! I was a mathematician and studied engineering. How did you keep track of the different threads and weave them into a cohesive whole? Your mastery of multiple plot lines is dazzling. I received hundreds of calls from acquaintances, long-lost relatives, strangers who swore they were relatives, talkers all, wanting to tell me their stories. Once I understood what kind of book I was writing, I spread the word among family and friends that I was looking for stories. For this novel it was books, books, and more books: Calvino, Homer, Ovid Koran, Bible, Bhagavad Gita literary, commercial, and pulp fiction Arabic poetry and folktales a hakawati’s book German studies of Arabic tales Marvel comics, DC comics, Astérix and Obélix, Tintin Nabokov, Borges, Nooteboom Shakespeare’s plays and memoirs written by family members now long gone.īut then I’ve always considered myself fortunate to be Lebanese.

I’ve always been influenced by my reading. What are some of the oral and written storytelling sources that influenced you in the writing of this book? It was a year later, in 2004, that it finally occurred to me that it was one novel, that everything fit together because the grandfather was a hakawati, and so was the entire family. I wanted to write about a family gathered around a deathbed I wanted to write a novel about parents and offspring I wanted to write a novel about the grandfather and how a family begins, how it forms (Abraham, Ishmael, Isaac?) I wanted to tell stories. I didn’t have a structure, and I had stories raging and clawing in my chest. Then I found out that the city was a hotbed of pigeon wars. I discovered that Urfa was the birthplace of Abraham, so I began to reread Old Testament stories. I placed the man in Urfa because I had read a memoir based there. I couldn’t follow through on any of my previous ideas, so I began to write something completely different: the first grandfather chapter. Then, in 2003, I was teaching in Beirut when my father was dying in the hospital. I had different ideas for novels in my head, though, and none of them seemed to make much sense. I wrote a couple more stories, one successful, the other not. That was Chapter Ten from the novel in a different form. In 1999, I wrote a long piece that was later trimmed and published as a short story. In the Middle East, a hakawati is a storyteller and in his magical and exuberant fourth novel, The Hakawati, an LJ Best Book, Lebanese American author Rabih Alameddine displays a Scheherazade-like genius for enchanting readers by interweaving multiple narratives revolving around several generations of a Lebanese family, with tales and stories within stories drawn from the Koran, the Bible, Arab folklore, Ovid, Shakespeare, and more.

The Storyteller, Or, the Hakawati by Rabih Alameddine