Death is front and centre in Beirut Hellfire Society, but in Hage’s rendering it is as sensual as it is senseless this new work of fiction extends the streak of ab surdity that runs through the author’s previous three books.Īs with Carnival (2012), which follows a taxi driver who experiences the world through encounters with denizens of the urban underclass who are his passengers, and Cockroach (2008), told through the eyes of a despairing thief in Montreal, people who exist on the fringes are at the heart of Beirut Hellfire Society.
In short, this is a spectacular and timely new work from one of our major writers, and a mature, exhilarating return to some of the themes the author began to explore in his transcendent first novel, De Niro's Game.“This is a book of mourning for the many who witnessed senseless wars, and for those who per ished in those wars.” So writes Rawi Hage in the acknowledgements to his fourth novel. It asks what, if anything, can be accomplished or preserved in the face of certain change and certain death. Combining comedy and tragedy, Beirut Hellfire Society is a brilliant, urgent meditation on what it is to live through war. Pavlov agrees to take up his father's work for the Society, and over the course of the novel acts as survivor-chronicler of his torn and fading community, bearing witness to both its enduring rituals and its inevitable decline.
Beirut Hellfire Society follows Pavlov, the twenty-something son of an undertaker, who, after his father's death, is approached by a member of the mysterious Hellfire Society-an anti-religious sect that, among their many rebellious and often salacious activities, arrange secret burial for those who have been denied it because the deceased was homosexual, atheist, or otherwise outcast and abandoned by their family, church, and state. Now, with Beirut Hellfire Society, Hage makes a stunning and mature return to wartorn Beirut of the 1970s, during the Civil War. Since publishing De Niro's Game more than a decade ago, Hage has followed up with two award-winning and acclaimed novels set in Montreal's immigrant community: Cockroach (shortlisted for the Giller Prize), and Carnival (shortlisted for the GG and Writers' Trust Fiction prizes). An explosive new novel from the award-winning, bestselling author of De Niro's Game and Cockroach, and only the second Canadian (after Alistair Macleod) to win the prestigious Dublin IMPAC Literary Award.Beirut Hellfire Society is a brilliant return to the world Rawi Hage first imagined in his extraordinary, award-winning first novel De Niro's Game, winner of the Dublin IMPAC Award, an international bestseller, finalist for the Giller, Governor General's, and Writers' Trust literary prizes, and widely considered a new Canadian classic.
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