But Rawi Hage's Beirut Hellfire Society is, actually, deeply set in any place consumed by killing and death during any time in human history. Here, escape into perceived comforts and safety is not an option." - Foreword Reviews
There are, it insists, real and horrible consequences of wars that cannot be ignored, forgotten, or romanticized. "At times brutally intense, Beirut Hellfire Society unsettles detached views of war. "A well-turned seriocomic tale about death in a place where it's become inescapable." - Kirkus Reviews Hage reminds us of what it takes for a novel to endure on the level of both form and content." - Quill & Quire (starred review) It's a timeless story of the outcast whose act of witness chronicles the world he observes. " Beirut Hellfire Society is a novel of tragic beauty and dark humour that is comfortable with contradiction and charged with probing philosophical insights and the luminosity of Arabic poetry. Comparisons aren't always useful, but this reviewer thought of a work…equally unflinching in its de-romanticizing of a subject most of us prefer to avoid: Cormac McCarthy's Blood Meridian." - Montreal Gazette "A wild, viscerally exciting and often bleakly funny novel of ideas. " Beirut Hellfire Society crackles with the kinetic energy of a dancer…The absurd volume of deaths is also tempered by Hage's signature dark humor and stylistic playfulness." - Toronto Star His new role introduces him to an unconventional cast of characters, including a father searching for his son's body, a mysterious woman who takes up residence on Pavlov's stairs after a bombing, and the flamboyant head of the Hellfire Society, El-Marquis.ĭeftly combining comedy with tragedy, gritty reality with surreal absurdity, Beirut Hellfire Society asks: What, after all, can be preserved in the face of certain change and imminent death? The answer is at once propulsive, elegiac, outrageous, profane, and transcendent―and a profoundly moving fable on what it means to live through war.
Pavlov agrees to take on his father's work for the society, and over the course of the novel he becomes a survivor-chronicler of his embattled and fading community at the heart of Lebanon's civil war. When his father meets a sudden and untimely death, Pavlov is approached by a colorful member of the mysterious Hellfire Society―an anti-religious sect that, among many rebellious and often salacious activities, arranges secret burial for outcasts who have been denied last rites because of their religion or sexuality. On a ravaged street overlooking a cemetery in Beirut's Christian enclave, we meet an eccentric young man named Pavlov, the son of a local undertaker. A searing and visionary novel set in war-torn 1970s Beirut, from an author praised for his "fierce poetic originality" ( Boston Globe) and "uncompromising vision" (Colm Tóibín).
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