"Tons of people have made this connection. I'm sorry to disappoint them," the award-winning author told CTV.ca.
Set during a bitterly cold Montreal winter, a down-and-out thief in an immigrant community fails to hang himself in a local park. Rescued against his will, the nameless man embarks on court-ordered sessions with a lame therapist to get to the root of his "problem." But the gulf that exists between this angry outsider and the na�ve professional culling his mind is too wide to cross.
Frozen emotionally by the strange new world he lives in, this trapped, lonely, self-loathing man hurls damnation upon the locals who find his strange accent and foreign ways remotely interesting.
Imagining himself as a cockroach that creeps into the comfortable lives of Montreal's privileged citizens, Hage's hero delivers a razor-sharp portrait of humanity as he moves between his violent childhood in a distant, war-torn country and the city's �migr� cafes.
"The imagery of this bug is so lowly and worthless. It endures and withstands all kinds of hardships. It seemed the perfect way to me to describe this man and his life," says Hage.
As Hage's disenchanted figure says in "Cockroach," "Yes, I am poor, I am vermin, a bug, I am at the bottom of the scale. But I still exist." It's that viewpoint that gives him the strength to go on in a hard, unwelcoming world.
"Whatever hopefulness there is in this story it's for the reader to decide," says Hage, a one-time cab driver who emerged from complete obscurity in 2006 with his debut novel, "DeNiro's Game."
Rescued from the slush pile at House of Anansi Press, Hage's bestseller earned nominations for the Giller Prize and the Governor General's Literary Award. This tale of two young men growing up in war-torn Lebanon also won the IMPAC Dublin Literary Award, an international prize that plopped 100,000 Euros into Hage's pocket.
These achievements are remarkable considering that English is not this author's mother tongue. Hage's first language is Arabic and second language is French.
"The argument could be made, and very well, in fact, that none of this should be happening to me," says Hage. "I don't know why I've been so lucky, or why my work seems to speak to readers. But I think my books are very political and very relevant to the world we live in today."
Whatever comparisons critics make between "Cockroach" and "DeNiro's Game," Hage feels no need to link the two books. "They were done at different times in my life and met different needs for me as a writer," says Hage. "But looking back, when I was thinking about that first book in my cab, I was a pretty lucky guy."
