In Beirut Hellfire Society, Rawi Hage creates a dance that is savage, devastating, tender, mournful, and darkly, wickedly humorous. The novel is loosely a modern-day version of Antigone, set during one year of the Lebanese civil war. Rather than a sister intent on burying
…more her brother, the protagonist, Pavlov, lover of Greek mythology and culture, is the son of an undertaker following in his father's footsteps in his pledge to lay to rest those who have been denied a traditional burial. The story interweaves vignettes of an outrageous cast of characters, complete with talking dogs and ghosts, vicious gangsters, cross-dressing hedonists, and a niece who howls like a hyena, with Pavlov's journey to survive and wrest meaning from an existence in which war continuously tears apart the fabric of life, order, and meaning.
Hage writes with the incendiary passion of someone whose early years were shaped by the war that tore Lebanon apart between 1975 and 1990. In this work, life cannot be taken for granted from one minute to the next; streets are a chaos of rubble and destroyed buildings; the falling bombs are as omnipresent as the rain. Since childhood, Pavlov has watched the "parade of caskets" that winds toward the cemetery beneath his window. Death and life form a continuous dance that, his father teaches him, is forged in fire. With sparse, urgent, and wounding prose Hage lays bare the nature of war and its human consequences. The book is, as he states in the acknowledgements, "a book of mourning," but it is also a book of hope. Beneath the despair, Hage shows us that hope and life always burn beneath the surface, waiting to be kindled. (less)
