Koolaids

Koolaids is the first novel by Rabih Alameddine, a writer and painter who lives between San Francisco and Beirut. It was published in 1998.

The two settings are cities at war in different ways. San Francisco from the middle of the 1980s into the 1990s is where the AIDS epidemic empties out a community, and Beirut over the same period is where a civil war does similar work by other means. The book is not organised as one continuous story. It is made of short sections, among them diary entries, emails, newspaper reports, prayers and dialogues, and they come from a number of narrators, some of whom are dead.

Death, sex and the question of what a life is for run through the whole volume. The fragments do not resolve into a single account, and the narrators disagree with one another and with themselves. The full title is Koolaids: The Art of War, and among the fragments are fictional news reports that the book uses to show how badly the mass media carried either catastrophe.