Koolaids

I highly recommend the book. Rabih Alameddine is a master and captures the friendships and introspection of gay men in San Francisco as they discover they have AIDS and face an early death. There are many voices in the book and they are interwoven in time and place (San Francisco and Beruit) and often seem anonymous which is why once I finished the book I started reading it again, because this time I had a better sense of the identity behind the voices. I think this is a really important book - not only because of the subject, but the writing style and the raw genuine emotion and empathy it is able to evoke. You really should read this book. Also an Unnecessary Woman was a really good read as well.

A darkly funny, beautiful and heartbreaking critique of abstraction when discussing war, disease, and relationships.

Coming from a Lebanese-American family and living in Washington, I was interested in what Alemeddine was putting together in this book. Although it took me some time to touch each narrative to its central character -- there're quite a few central characters here -- I found the treatment of their separate but eerily similar situations sensitive and sensual. This is definitely worth reading, and I would hope that more English-speaking Lebanese and Lebanese-American writers come forth with valuable works.

This beautiful book takes you inside the mind of a gay Lebanese man, tracing both the AIDS crisis and the tragedy of Beruit from a deeply humanistic POV.

Sublime writing. Creates the story and puts you right inside it.

What a pity. I found myself skipping over the sections on Beirut and politics. “An unnecessary woman” still remains his best work ever!

Excellent writer. Kept me engaged.

When you write a book about AIDS and what it brings in its wake, is not an easy task for sure. Rabih Alameddine jumped to the scene and was well-known right after “An Unnecessary Woman”. The book just jumped at readers and they I think too notice of him then. Of course before that, there was “Koolaids” and some more books that he had written but this discussion is about “Koolaids”.To me reading “Koolaids” was a harrowing experience. Why? Because I am gay and I didn’t know how to react to a book on AIDS, and what it takes in its wake. I cannot for the life of me imagine something like this happening to me or my loved ones, so whenever I read something like this, I am completely overwhelmed by it.“Koolaids” is about men who love men, men who suffer by loving men and men who cope as their worlds fall apart and changes around them. It is a fresh new voice (then when the book released) and is very different from his other books. It details the AIDS epidemic through the 80s and the 90s and with that the angle of the Lebanese Civil War that accounts for the book.The characters are plenty – they love and dream in fragments. As a reader, I just gave in to the book without trying to make much of it in the first fifty pages and when I started, I was too entranced by the language and over all plot to care about the writing.“Koolaids” is what it is – a gritty and real book on what it takes to go on living in the face of death and how to sometimes just give in, knowing that nothing can be done now. It is stories such as these that deeply affect us and our lives.