Koolaids
On sale
5th August 1999
Price: £12.99
Selected:
Paperback / ISBN-13: 9780349110615
A dazzling literary debut, KOOLAIDS shatters the dimension of time and mimes the chaos of contemporary existence as it details the impact of the AIDS epidemic and the Lebanese civil war on a circle of family and friends.
In clips, quips, memories and hallucinations, tragic news reports and hilarious short plays, diary entries and conversations, KOOLAIDS tells the stories of a group of individuals who can no longer love or think except in fragments of time.
Their dances with death – in wartorn Beirut, with the scourge of AIDS – form a raging affirmation of life.
In clips, quips, memories and hallucinations, tragic news reports and hilarious short plays, diary entries and conversations, KOOLAIDS tells the stories of a group of individuals who can no longer love or think except in fragments of time.
Their dances with death – in wartorn Beirut, with the scourge of AIDS – form a raging affirmation of life.
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Reviews
A wildly imaginative tour de force - impressive, stunning
In its unflinching refusal to bury the darkness with its postmodernist pyrotechnics, it is a camera obscura in which our miserable century can view the dumbshow of its cruel procession. This book is not to be missed.
Excellent ... Alameddine can be so funny. Wit, of course can be used to devastating effect when highlighting iniquity and tragedy and this is done here with great mastery. Koolaids transcends the ubiquity of AIDS as a subject, to become a much wider and more universal meditation on the vagaries of life (and death)
A moving and angry book
Hyperactive and apocalyptic - a lesson in how to mix a war zone (Beirut), sex (AIDS) and destruction (the Grim Reaper) and come up laughing
Koolaids is the companion guide to The Tibetan Book of the Dead, The Diary of Anne Frank and the history of the world. It is hysterical in both senses. hilarious and loudly disturbing ... daring in its somersault of literary feats and allusions, an antidote to anyone who suffers from the blahs or an excess of self-satisfaction. I hope its widely read. Just think of the fascinating dinner conversations and epitahs it could spawn. I think Kant, June and Borges would approve