![]() ![]() In one scene, a barber, who has stepped from the chair to make coffee for his morning customers, returns to find they’ve all been blown to bits. ![]() ![]() Call him Harry Bosch but in Lebanon, a ghastly place at the time. Pavlov is an irresistible lead: stony, well-read, tightly controlled, with a deep well of sadness. “Everyone loves Beirut and everyone is scared of Beirut,” a character says.īetween love and fear is a hell of a story. What makes Rawi Hage’s new novel, “Beirut Hellfire Society,” distinct among similar efforts, and worth reading - transcending, as it does, a few moments of overwriting and sloppy summarizing - is the daring way the author illustrates the great and insane freedom that is actually possible in the most dire of circumstances. It’s one thing to write about war, another to write about conflict in the Middle East, and a third to do so about Beirut, in the late 1970s, when civil war first broke out. Then the father is killed by an explosion, falling into a freshly dug grave, and so Pavlov must decide: What kind of man will I be? How will I bury the dead, and can I resist those uncles who want the second hearse, and what should I do with the priest’s foot, which lands on the balcony, after yet another blast, like a hunk of old meat? For years such funerals featured dancing and music, but with bullets and then bombs, a funeral soon means fighters and the firing of guns. On a dusty side street on the east side of Beirut, a young man named Pavlov is studying his father, the undertaker, as a funeral procession slinks by. ![]()
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