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Beirut hellfire society by rawi hage5/19/2023 ![]() ![]() Hage is nothing if not a very intriguing, articulate writer who is not afraid of taking risks. Weeks and months pass when nothing happens apart from the numbing routines of war, death, and funerals. comes across as a series of loosely connected vignettes. ![]() But these encounters only ever accumulate detail rather than momentum or interest (which can also be a problem with Hage’s awkwardly unfurling sentences). The book is structured as a series of digressions, somewhat in the style of The Arabian Nights, as Pavlov bounces off the oddballs who swerve in and out of his path. But while his novel has episodic pleasures, it never coheres. Hage has some heretical fun with this mix-and-match approach to religious mythology, and he’s obviously declaring his own affinities with the misfits and outcasts of the world. If sectarian identities are intractable and rigid, Hage’s new novel is a parade of deviants. They are caught in a peculiarly Lebanese dilemma: either accept one’s role in a community defined by its antagonism toward others, or else become invisible, impotent, disposable. ![]() This usually means a sectarian identity, though Hage is also interested in how his characters define themselves as men (his female characters are notably short on self-reflection). Hage’s more pointed suggestion is that acts of violence are the result of a person’s embracing a particular identity. ![]()
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