Alameddine is a writer with a boundless imagination, and his latest book feels almost completely unrestrained. In the hands of a less gifted author, that could be a problem. But Alameddine's writing is so beautiful, so exuberant, that the reader is willing to go along with the ride, no matter how wild it is. And it does get wild — some passages approach stream-of-consciousness, but there's nothing in the novel that's remotely self-indulgent ... The Angel of History isn't just a brilliant novel, it's a heartfelt cry in the dark, a reminder that we can never forget our past, the friends and family we've loved and lost.
The Angel of History is a remarkable novel, a commentary of love and death, creativity and spirituality, memory and survival ... The depths of despair Jacob enters is heartrending. If it weren’t for Alameddine’s gift with language, and his ability to present Jacob’s wounds in such a poetic manner, the novel could have been unbearable ... Structural issues aside, I forgave all when I read the ending. It’s a beauty ... an AIDS book that will hopefully re-enliven the genre.
Like Alameddine’s last book, the National Book award-shortlisted An Unnecessary Woman, this is a story of one life and many themes: in this case, death and sex; religion; war; the purpose of art and of love and loss; and the need to remember. Here is a book, full of story, unrepentantly political at every level. At a time when many western writers seem to be in retreat from saying anything that could be construed as political, Alameddine says it all, shamelessly, gloriously and, realised like his Satan, in the most stylish of forms.
Like Tony Kushner’s play [Angels in America], The Angel of History is an elegy for a lost generation of gay men. It is also a structurally inventive bildungsroman ... much of the story—filtered through Jacob’s notebooks and conversations between Death, Satan, and a succession of angels—is an abstraction. We learn few details about Doc; he remains a wraithlike place-marker, a surrogate for the Unknown AIDS Victim ... Nevertheless, The Angel of History marks the triumph of memory over oblivion.
...[an] excellent, lissome new novel ... While I’ve been describing the novel as a relatively straightforward narrative about poetry and loss, it also contains a fanciful (and not entirely successful) structural frame ... Alameddine intersperses Jacob’s narration with an ongoing conversation between Satan and Death...Lest this sound overly academic, let me say that Alameddine is able to make this intertextuality sexy ... The Angel of History suggests that to be alienated — from past love and from the past itself — is to open the door to memory and creation. To dwell within Jacob’s mind and to read Alameddine’s prose is to see loss, if not mastered, then at least made into lively and living art.
The Lebanese-American author delivers an Arabian Nights entertainment for our century, taking us through a kaleidoscope of tales ... With its dizzying array of verbal and visual allusions, Angel is wildly entertaining, but not necessarily an easy read ... the reader also blushes as the boundaries between spectator/performer and reader/writer dissolve. We all have been skewered by the Parable of the Arab in a Cage.
...tart and rigorous read, a densely layered and ultimately agonizing series of stories in which our hero is haunted by a past he can’t seem to allow himself to forget ... The idea of what’s real and who’s in control is handled most memorably with an electrifying story within the story ... There’s a real tension reading The Angel of History, a discomfort in not knowing, accompanied by the vexing suspicion we’ll always struggle to make meaningful connections.
...[a] smart, impassioned and uneven novel ... Just when you’re expecting sentimentality, Jacob hits you with a bolt of bracing R-rated humor. He’s especially good at dreaming up filthy riffs based on beloved poetry ... But The Angel of History, for all its intelligence and immediacy, can also be frustrating ... At times, Alameddine’s novel reads like a script for a stilted stage play. The good news is that the narrative dead-ends are clearly labeled ('Satan’s Interviews' and 'Jacob’s Stories') and take up no more than a third of the page count. The rest of The Angel of History is Alameddine at his best, or very close to it.
Satan and Death could easily make for very heavy-handed, or at least awkwardly earnest, characters. But in these incarnations they’re suavely funny and combative, and they mostly escape the danger of becoming painful clichés. These are not Biblical characters, but literary ones ... We still want climactic resolution from our novels, literary or not, and The Angel of History doesn’t even make a pro forma attempt to build the kind of narrative tension that could ever lead to that satisfaction ... But this novel doesn’t need to have an exciting plot, shouldn’t have an exciting plot, because that would distract from the important work that needs to be done, both by Jacob and by the readers: to remember the dead ... a fierce, unapologetic wake-up call.
If the supernatural characters at first feel silly, by the novel’s end Mr Alameddine has beguiled us with his insight and compassion. His stories take the reader into the labyrinth that is the mind. Like his National Book Award-nominated novel An Unnecessary Woman, The Angel of History is digressive and daring, presenting the existential drama of a single human life ... 'How can you allow the world to forget us, to delete our existence, the grand elision of queer history?' he rails, until Satan—and this brilliant author—ensure that we will not.
Alameddine forgoes the use of chronology and plotting in favor of constructing a character study of a brilliant but tormented soul ... The novel has a choppy, disturbing quality, which is perhaps a technique to immerse the reader into Jacob’s mental landscape. It is not an easy read. In the end, what propels one to keep turning the pages is Jacob’s indomitable spirit in dealing with whatever comes his way.
