Fly is a taxi driver in a crime-ridden apocalyptic metropolis. Raised in the circus, Fly sees everything, taking in all of the city's carnivalesque beauty and ugliness as he roves through its dizzying streets in his taxi. Fly is a reader, too, his tiny apartment filled with books. His best friend is Otto, a political activist who's in and out of jails and asylums. One night Fly meets Mary, a book-loving passenger with a domineering husband. So begins a romance that is, for Fly, a brief glimmer of light amid the shadows and grit of the Carnival city. Along with Otto and Mary, Fly introduces us to madmen and revolutionaries, magicians and prostitutes as he picks them up and drops them off, traveling through a nightmarish town that is--we can't help but notice--a parable for our own debauched, unjust world.--From publisher description.
During a bitterly cold winter in a snowy northern city, a self-confessed thief has just tried to commit suicide by hanging himself from a tree in the local park. Rescued against his will and obliged to attend sessions with a well-meaning but naive therapist, our narrator tells her – and us – his heartrending and hallucinatory story.From his childhood in a war-torn Arab country, to his current life in the smoky emigre cafes of his new city, Cockroach traces our narrator's journey – his longing for a place in the world, his guilt over his sister's death at the hands of her husband, and his love for an Iranian woman, Shoreh, whose life is also a flight from the darkness of the past. As the stories in this remarkable book converge, our narrator must confront the events of the past in the form of another moral but potentially murderous dilemma in the present . . .
