Beirut Hellfire Society (a Novel)

By (author) Hage Rawi
Short description/annotation
“Truly a masterpiece.” —Lawrence Joseph
Description

On a ravaged street overlooking a cemetery in a Christian enclave in war-torn 1970s Beirut, we meet Pavlov, the son of a local undertaker. When his father dies suddenly, Pavlov is approached by a member of the mysterious Hellfire Society—an anti-religious sect that arranges secret burial for outcasts denied last rites because of their religion or sexuality. 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 faded community at the heart of Lebanon’s civil war.

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"[Beirut Hellfire Society] draws on Hage’s antic, many-voiced gifts to make a chronicle of war and unrelenting death into a provocative entertainment."
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"[A] playfully scabrous novel that draws nearly as much from Nabokov as from Lebanon’s grisly civil war.… The writing is bravura, the humor, stygian and the thrill of expression, triumphant."
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"[A] hell of a story.… Pavlov is an irresistible lead: stony, well-read, tightly controlled, with a deep well of sadness. Call him Harry Bosch but in Lebanon."
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"Hallucinatory.… [A] faceted meditation on existentialism."
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"Beirut Hellfire Society crackles with the kinetic energy of a dancer.… The absurd volume of deaths is also tempered by [Rawi] Hage’s signature dark humor and stylistic playfulness."
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"A wild, viscerally exciting and often bleakly funny novel of ideas. 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."
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"Potent.… Hage’s novel is a brisk, surreal, and often comic plunge into surviving the absurd nihilism of war."
Biographical note
Rawi Hage  is the author of four novels. Beirut Hellfire Society was longlisted for the Scotiabank Giller Prize, shortlisted for the Rogers Writers’ Trust Fiction Prize, and a finalist for the Governor General’s Literary Award. Born in Beirut, Lebanon, Hage now lives in Montreal.