Between Old World Circus and New World Carnival: Reading Rawi Hage

The city spaces inhabited by Fly, the narrator and main character of Carnival, are never named. Having grown up in a travelling circus, Fly loses his parents at an early age and is obliged to immigrate to the Americas. There, driving a taxi takes the place of the itinerant circus both as a means of earning a living and as a narrative machine that allows Fly to hear and participate in the stories of an endless series of clients and fellow drivers. Unfolding in five acts at the time of carnival, the novel uses ironic reversals, colliding worldviews and unruly masquerades to complicate narratives of migration and raise difficult questions about religion, law, history, violence, body and nation.