Beirut Hellfire Society

by Rawi Hage

After his undertaker father’s death, laconic, Greek mythology– reading Pavlov is approached by a member of the mysterious Hellfire Society— an antireligious 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. Pavlov agrees to take up his father’s work for the society, and over the course of the novel acts as survivor- chronicler of his torn and fading community, bearing witness to both its enduring rituals and its inevitable decline.


In Beirut Hellfire Society, award- winning author Rawi Hage— praised for his “fierce poetic originality” (Boston Globe) and “uncompromising vision” (Colm Tóibín)— 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 meditation on what it means to live through war.

Genres: Fiction, Historical Fiction, War, Canada, Lebanon, Audiobook, Middle East

288 pages, Hardcover

Published July 16, 2019

About the author

Rawi Hage is a Lebanese Canadian writer and photographer.

Born in Beirut, Hage grew up in Lebanon and Cyprus. He moved to New York City in 1982, and after studying at the New York Institute of Photography, relocated to Montreal in 1991, where he studied arts at Dawson College and Concordia University. He subsequently began exhibiting as a photographer, and has had works acquired by the Canadian Museum of Civilization and the Musée de la civilisation de Québec.

Hage has published journalism and fiction in several Canadian magazines. His debut novel, De Niro's Game, was shortlisted for the 2006 Scotiabank Giller Prize and the 2006 Governor General's Award for English fiction. He was also awarded two Quebec awards, Hugh MacLennan Prize for Fiction and the McAuslan First Book Prize at the Quebec Writers' Federation literary awards.

Reviews

[Paltia · Rating 4 out of 5]

A book about the randomness of whistling bombs, destruction and death in 1978 Beirut. A father tenderly guides his son, Pavlov, through the ceremonies of cremation for all those the state denies a burial in consecrated ground and those preferring a fire funeral. They believe fire is a passage and a dance. Its destruction brings renewal. Hage offers a sardonic view of petty rulers, organized religion, government, and war. He wields words like a weapon blasting into the banality of unambiguous morality during war time. Spiked with occasionally humorous conversations, mysterious texts in Syriac, Arabic and Latin, and a narrator like no other. Where his father leaves off a talking dog named Rex, and a war traumatised, our lady of the stairs, picks up to offer friendship and lessons in love. In the end there is music, dance and fire. Lots of fire and the joyful release of the howl as modeled by Rex. As their light forever burns its time for the dead to dance.
“ That night echoes of a howl rose from the valley and up into the clouds towards the elsewhere of the stars.”

[Lata · Rating 4 out of 5]

I am ambivalent about this book:
I thought the writing was great, and the individual episodes describing the complexity of beliefs and attitudes, as expressed by the many characters in this story, was fascinating. And the setting, during the Lebanese civil war, with the constant violence and threat of unexpected death due to bombings and gunfire, was horrifying.
I've decided, however, Rawi Hage's work is not really for me. This is the second book by him that I've attempted, and the only one I've finished. The book is really good, but I don't think I'm the right audience for his work.

[Michelle · Rating 1 out of 5]

I wanted so much more from this book.

If you like needlessly explicit descriptions of eye-rolling male fantasies, a main character who does nothing and yet muses on about the world because he read a bit of philosophy years ago (I feel like we all have someone like this in our life), and a plot that goes no where, well have I got a book for you!

[JR is Reading · Rating 5 out of 5]

Ahhh Rawi Hage. He's just on another level. This surpasses Cockroach as my favourite of his books (caveat - I've never read Deniro's Game). I loved the endless ways he created to approach death, violence, family, sex, hate, dance in this book. I like my books dark and my themes intricately explored and this is that. And as dark as it is there is joy and insight too. Rawi creates characters that you love and hate simultaneously - characters you feel you know intimately one moment and yet are violently surprised by the next. Complexity that both mirrors real life and transcends it. Don't miss this if you're a fan of Rawi - don't miss it if you've never read him either.

[Krista · Rating 4 out of 5]

Now, the man told his son, you're sixteen – old enough to become a member of the Society. The Hellfire Society, the father added. He switched on the car radio, and drove towards the coast and then up into the mountains of Lebanon.

In the prologue to Beirut Hellfire Society, an undertaker introduces his teenaged son, Pavlov, to a secret crematorium in the mountains surrounding Beirut – burial is the only officially sanctioned method for cadaver disposal, although both the Christians and the Muslims of the city deny it to their outcasts – and as the book begins, it is several years later, the father is dead, and Pavlov is enlisted to take over the work of cremating the atheists, hedonists, homosexuals, and other “undesirables” of the community. Having grown up in a house beside the Christian cemetery, Pavlov has spent his entire life watching parades of mourners go by from an upper balcony, and as the city's civil war escalates (this is the 1970's) and as the priest leads an unending stream of mourners for dead militiamen to their gravesites, Pavlov starts to suffer from mounting nihilism: Just what is the point of this war? What is the point of life itself? Told in short, episodic chapters, we are introduced to a wide variety of characters – with only a couple of threads stretching throughout the whole book – and written in Rawi Hage's typically lyrical and engaging style, I immensely enjoyed this return to the world of Hage's knockout debut, De Niro's Game. I was struck by the short, quirky observations:

Women in black gowns dragged their ponderous heels on the unpaved road, and men in sombre colours shortened, with their breath, white cigarettes trapped between their scissor-like fingers and lead-filled teeth.

I was intrigued by the details that Pavlov observes from his balcony: pallbearers dancing with the coffins of unmarried young men to give them a combination wedding/funeral; the ironic dangers of having a funeral parade as bombs are falling all around; the dwindling availability of pallbearers as the young men die off, Christians emigrate, and family lines are extinguished. And I was enchanted by longer passages and their mixed imagery about the banality of constant warfare:

Poor terrestrial dead, Pavlov thought, miserable cadavers confined to their rectangular demarcation. They have to endure the crushing weight of the earth, and the bird's-eye-view of apathetic gravediggers pouring earth into their eyes. He hurried back home, lit a cigarette and stood on his balcony. He inhaled and exhaled with force, and bade farewell to the smoke on this day of light rain and blossoming trees and the shameless appearance of flowers, pink pirouettes exuberant with scent and colour that mingled with bullets falling from weapons in the hands of fighters wearing cheap white sneakers with green rubber soles made in China.

In the main part of the book, the stream of people with alternative beliefs and lifestyles who come to Pavlov's door to prearrange their own cremations demonstrates the Beirut of the time to have been a safe haven for intellectuals, Bohemians, and sexual adventurers. Yet in a modern day epilogue, when Pavlov's heir moves into the family home overlooking the Christian cemetery, the now Muslim-dominated neighbourhood isn't quite so tolerant of Westernised values. So what were all those young men fighting and dying for during Lebanon's civil war? This article in Maclean's points out the book's key inspiration from an interview with Rawi Hage:

In the epilogue, when the story moves briefly to the present, Beirut Hellfire Society’s underlying connective thread – a kind of geocultural determinism – becomes fully visible. Pavlov’s half-Swedish great-niece comes upon the scene and starts to morph into Pavlov. “Yes, it’s a story about families and lineages,” says Hage, “that asks how people are transformed by their geographies. How important is it to stay in one space? Maybe we should all become wanderers. I just don’t know.”

And based on that information, I reckon this is the key passage from the book itself:

These few left-over Christians in the Middle East should leave, the Bohemian said. They should leave this land and spread out all over the earth. The world is vast and these early converts are holding on, in vain, to their mythologies, religion, and a handful of picturesque valleys and mountains. Who and what are they fighting for? They should leave. Leave this country to the Muslims, and then the Muslims will leave it to someone else one day. I have never understood attachments to land and culture. Look at them, sliding one coffin after another into the pit! They wasted the little life they could have had elsewhere. They were never tolerated, and they tolerated no one. The Gods of these lands are cruel, jealous, petty, and archaic. These converts should leave and roam the planet...

There's plenty to think about here, and with scenes and language that consistently intrigued me, I found this rather non-traditional novel to be thoroughly captivating.

[Boston · Rating 3 out of 5]

3.5 stars

[Alex · Rating 3 out of 5]

I was a big fan of Hage's DeNiro's Game and had high hopes for his new release. While conceptually it was super intriguing, Hage doesn't execute it as well as I had hoped.

Following Pavlov, a son of a dead undertaker who serviced the marginalized (homosexuals, atheists, sexual deviants) who were unable to receive proper burials in the midst of civil war Lebanon, we are introduced to various characters whose lifestyles preclude them from acceptance among more conservative forces in society. Their stories are compelling and tragic but quickly become repetitive and it is confusing as to what purpose each new character has to Pavlov's plot. The story bogs down and meanders in the middle parts as Hage tries to figure out how Pavlov's story will find conclusion and although it eventually finds its paths, by the time it does we have lost some interest, far from the intrigue we first had.

Hage's writing is nonetheless beautiful and captures the mood and atmosphere of a war torn Lebanon at the end of the 1970s. However, at times he appears to try too hard, forcing ornate devices that do not work as well for the reader as I am sure Hage hopes (Pavlov's obsession with Greek mythology feels unnecessary and too forced for example). So while this novel is worth picking up, the lack of cohesion lets the book down at the end and made me feel that this was more of a draft than a finished work.

Alas

[Brooke · Rating 2 out of 5]

The description of this book seemed so promising – it’s a story about the son of an undertaker, who after his father’s death, is approached by the mysterious Hellfire Society, an anti-religious sect that arranges burials for those who have been denied them. I was immediately intrigued and the first few chapters drew me in, but then the book lost me completely. I have no idea what I just finished reading...

Several years ago, I read Hage’s novel, Cockroach, for an English assignment. I spent days working to understand it, and I ended up quite enjoying it. But I just don’t have the time or energy to do that with this book. It’s a bit too bizarre and abstract for me to understand on the surface level, and it’s obvious to me that the underlying messages in this book went over my head.

Thank you to NetGalley and Knopf (Penguin Random House Canada) for providing me with an ARC of Beirut Hellfire Society, in exchange for an honest review.

[Alexander Kosoris · Rating 5 out of 5]

Taking place in the midst of the Lebanese civil war in the late ’70s, Beirut Hellfire Society follows Pavlov, the son of an undertaker. After the sudden passing of his father, Pavlov agrees to carry on his life’s work helping an underground organization perform last rites for those denied proper burials because of their lifestyle, sexuality, or religion. The story explores how people try to carry on in spite of the carnage around them, and looks at the smaller, violent feuds that arise in such an environment.

I struggled a bit with Beirut Hellfire Society mainly because I was reading about soldiers and fighting and killing, but I didn’t seem to be feeling much of anything. Rather than just assuming it was just a problem with me and my ability to empathize, I realized early on that I could at least partially attribute my response to the writing. Pavlov observes the terrors of war stolidly, and this manner at least partially influences the way the reader experiences the story. As well, the imagery employed throughout came off far too light for the grisly things described––a good example being long dead skeletons getting blown out of the ground by an errant bomb compared to frolicking dolphins. So it seemed that the failure to evoke an emotional response stemmed from a failure of expression.

But then something changed: I felt something. Not something from the greater war, but from the personal conflicts into which Pavlov entered. This made me consider that Beirut Hellfire Society wasn’t marred by a failure of expression, that everything viewed as such had intent behind it. What became clear upon re-evaluation was what Hage wanted us to understand of living within a warzone, that people become numb to the destruction in the effort to maintain some sort of normalcy within it. It feels unreal, like it can’t touch you, until you’re hit with something that connects everything to you or those you love. The triumph of the book is that the author doesn’t just describe this, but that he so effectively puts the reader in a similar mindset as he explores the ways his characters react when they get there, when they truly feel the touch of the conflict.

Just keep in mind that, if you give this book a try, the subtle writing may make this some degree of inaccessible. But stick with it if you do––there’s richness that can be found within the pages so long as you’re able to be receptive to your emotions while you read.

[Ian Shaw · Rating 5 out of 5]

For those who understand the civil war in Lebanon, Rawi Hage's latest novel, Beirut Hellfire Society, brings very special meaning. Its hero, Pavlov, is the antithesis of the sectarianism that destroyed one of the most progressive countries in the Middle East. Some readers will enjoy the novel for its simple but moving prose. Others will relish its irreverence and philosophical wanderings. But like Gibran Khalil Gibran, Hage's story-telling unravels layers of human behaviour, leaving all of us with valuable life lessons.

[Naomi · Rating 5 out of 5]

This review originally appeared in BookBrowse Journal.

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 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 smolder, waiting to be kindled.

[Kevin · Rating 2 out of 5]

A book about a voyeur, who ironically isn't that great of a subject to follow for three hundred pages himself. Littered with secondary characters. Too tonally similar to De Niro's Game. Could have been, but ay ay ay I really wanted something different. AGAIN, really nicely written, but the punch that everyone says Hage delivers never quite hits me. 😞

Maybe my taste and Rawi Hage's style don't match up. I will probably give the next one a pass.

[Dana · Rating 4 out of 5]

Hard to put into words something so brilliant.

[Beverly · Rating 4 out of 5]

This was a 3.5 read for me.
thoughts coming shortly

[Maryam · Rating 4 out of 5]

It was one of the difficult books to rate! The writing is very good, and I liked how there were parts of different people with different beliefs and how they collided with each other. It's about Lebonan civil war but it doesn't talk about war directly, it's about people! how their backgrounds shaped the moments of the war and destruction.

It wasn't an easy read for me but overall I enjoyed it.

[Ana · Rating 2 out of 5]

1.5/5

You're a lucky man, Pavlov. You like these endings because they assure you of your own existence. The end can only be witnessed by those who persevere, the quiet survivors.

Beirut, 1978, Pavlov watches the cemetery road as the civil war destroys Lebanon. The son of a recently deceased undertaker, he has now taken his father's place in the secret Hellfire Society: a group of people who reject the common religious and social practices regarding burial and wish for something else to be done with their remains, mostly cremation. Doing his work Pavlov encounters diverse people and situations that give us glimpses into the reality of living during violent times and how people endure and cope.

I didn't care for this mostly because Pavlov was a terrible protagonist. He was more of an external observer of the situation than an actual participant and in this case it just didn't work for me. Having him so removed made it hard to care about what would happen to him so the chapters where it's only Pavlov were boring and too navel gaze-y for me. The best moments were when he actually felt something and showed any emotion, but sadly these moments were few and far between. And while we had all these other characters in their own mini stories who did some of the heavy emotional lifting they would go by so quickly that I also didn't care.

If you were interested in the Hellfire Society itself, I would not pick this book up because that's only a very tenuous device the author used to connect Pavlov to all these different POVs. Same if you wanted to read this thinking it was going to go deeper into Lebanon's civil war from an on the ground civilian perspective. I don't think I will pick anything else by this author, I don't enjoy the way he writes.

[Dawna Richardson · Rating 4 out of 5]

I received a copy of this book from Netgalley in exchange for an honest review.
This book is set in Beirut in the 1970’s, a time when war was raging and people were being killed on a regular basis. The main character, Pavlov, is the son and nephew of undertakers whose father was a member of the title society. From his father, Pavlov learned about the society as well as a secret place his father had for cremations and radical burial rites.
When his father is killed, Pavlov’s encounters with his family grow. His sister arrives to claim most of what can be moved in the house. His uncle undertakers attempt to get possession of his father’s hearse, but Pavlov has other plans for that. And finally, Pavlov is also recruited by the society to carry on the tradition. Although his favourite activity appears to be standing by his window and watching burial processions go by from the church to the cemetery, Pavlov does as he has been asked and encounters some very interesting characters and plot twists along the way.
This novel is unusual and dark but I found myself drawn into the story so I continued to read. Some of the scenarios seemed highly unlikely but the story flowed around corners and bends to its conclusion. Even there the finality is brought forward with an epilogue that keeps the story going. Overall, I enjoyed the journey!

[Magdelanye · Rating 4 out of 5]

All those books you've been reading have made you insensitive and corrupt. p39

This is not a book you will read for pleasure, despite the exquisite writing. It may not make you insensitive and corrupt, but it will crush your innocence if you have managed to retain it. And for those who like to disdain fiction as frivolous escapism, in reading this book there is no escape. The hopeful reader is catapulted into the disturbing scene and if it is fiction it is fiction infiltrated with facts, noise, dust, eviscerating smells. RH makes vivid not only the empty apparatus of war, and not just the bombs falling but the people the bombs are indiscriminately falling upon.

In this age of carelessness...war...opened windows of opportunity for the most impoverished, that elevated the deprived, the deranged, the meek with a yearning for vengeance and scores to settle. p80

This is a book to be read as witness, and to confirm the fact that war is inexcusable.

[MCZ Reads · Rating 3 out of 5]

Thank you to Goodreads and W. W. Norton for my ARC of Beirut Hellfire Society! I appreciate the opportunity to review this book.

This is a complex book that I'll be mentally wrestling for a while. I was expecting a more straightforward novel, but instead the book is a collection of episodic chapters. There's more observation than plot, which left me feeling like I'd read the author's thesis instead of a story. But there's some skilled writing here that captures the brutality and hopelessness of war as well as the ridiculous ways life asserts itself amidst chaos. I'd recommend this book to fans of Rawi Hage's other books and regular readers of history and philosophy, but it may not be for everyone.

[Sophia · Rating 3 out of 5]

Really unique setting, atmosphere, and characters.
And even though this book had some really interesting things to say on death, dying, and the people on the fringe of society, I couldn’t really pin down where the plot was going or what it was trying to do.
I think it would also benefit from leaning in to the exaggerated secondary characters.
Between 3 and 4 stars. Could have been a 4 if not for the very male-directed sex scenes in the first half.

[Cara Powick · Rating 2 out of 5]

This book had so much potential, but I just don’t get the point of it. I don’t even know what to say about it... just not good.

[Fran Blake · Rating 3 out of 5]

3.5 stars

[Jesse · Rating 4 out of 5]

Rawi Hage does it again. Beirut Hellfire Society is by far his most macabre story he's written; in fact, it may be the most macabre novel I've ever read. But it's good for a number of reasons.

It is the story of Pavlov, son of an undertaker, who follows his father's tradition after he passes. This in wartorn Lebanon, where senseless death and aching tragedy is a daily occurence. Pavlov lives at the cemetery, able to witness funerals from his window. And so, his entire life is a constant witness to tragedy. The tragedies of a civil war.

The people dying are not simply the old, but often, teenage boys who died in fighting. Not necessarily for their country, but within their country, for one of a diverse array of warring militias. Sometimes, the deceased are victims of bombs hitting random places, like markets or family homes, which was a frequent reality for regular people living in Lebanon during the 15 year Civil War. Sometimes, people were even killed during funerals. There are multiple tales centering around Pavlov's experiences, the things he sees, the people he interacts with, and his own madness from the combination of constant death mixed with his own solitude. It doesn't help when the friends one makes get killed, too.

It isn't Hage's best, but it's a good one. It reads with far less urgency than some of his previous work, and less excitement as well. But there is so much in the book that makes the reader think about the meaning of life, and especially, the meaning behind death. It isn't nice; the protagonist is cynical about everything and his perspective reflects it. Still, it's a worthwhile read which truly challenges the reader by surrounding them with ever changing flavors of tragedy amid a familiar cast of characters. The story asks the question a number of ways about the meaning behind existence. Also makes for good literary study once more in the Lebanese Civil War.

[Tom · Rating 3 out of 5]

We tend to live by the grace of having a future to dream about. As much as we have a personal past, we have a present and a future. If not today, then tomorrow. Being able to think this way, though, is a luxury, as is made evident by Rawi Hage's dark poetic account of living in a world where the only future perspective is death.

Much as in his previous novels, the protagonist, aptly named Pavlov, is an outsider and a voyeur. Just like his father, he is an undertaker, who specializes in giving people a burial the way they want it to happen. Outcasts from all over Beirut flock to his door to make their burial plans. Death is discussed casually, and the characters in the book seem very intent on making their death a special event.

It is all very sad, especially because there is a lot of dying in this novel. Hage writes in a very episodic style, leaning into carnivalesque themes of transgression and decadence all the time. There is Pavlov's cousin, Salwa, who has sex with a mechanic's son at the cemetery and who howls all the time. There is Pavlov's deep link with the canines around him, whom he values more than the dispendable people in his life.

The whole novel is grim, although beautifully written. I'm torn for the rating, as I did "enjoy" this novel, but it was clearly not on the same level as "Carnival", which remains my favourite novel of Hage's. The execution is more humorless, and the narrative whole is more loosely connected.

Then again, who reads a book about death for fun. If you feel like being transported into another world, one without real future, well ... I guess you probably wouldn't. But that's what makes it worth reading, in the end.

[Catey Fifield · Rating 3 out of 5]

Very strange, but not unpleasantly so. I think I would have found this book more captivating, more poetic, if I were a person obsessed with death. But I am not—not yet, anyway.

[Natalie Marlin]

DNF

I just couldn't make it through.

After one of the more promising and quietly beautiful prologues of anything I've read this year, the detached voice and stiff proceeding chapters left me feeling let down.

Then, after a bunch of short chapters, there's the first long one with El-Marquis and I lost all my patience during his insufferable 20-page monologue about how sleeping with his students was a form of spreading intellectualism, his anecdote about killing a man and his son while firing a gun during anal sex (was this supposed to be funny? sad? Hage tells us this without any discernible tone and drops this moment instantly, so who's to say), and a moment where he comes onto the underage protagonist (yikes), all while Pavlov finds him strange but "fascinating." Having read Dancing Lessons for the Advanced in Age earlier this year, this chapter came off as a far weaker imitation of the kind of palavering Hrabal accomplishes there and made my tolerance of this even lesser.

I'm not even dignifying this with any more comments. From what I've read of reviews here about the book's lack of payoff or forwarding of ideas, I think I'm making the right call in stopping here.

[Jim · Rating 2 out of 5]

Maybe I would have been better served to have read this book prior to Sinan Antoon's 'The Corpse Washer', which I found amazing and rather superior to Hage's tale of death amid near-perpetual war. Then again, maybe not. Probably not. I have finally come to realize I am not in tune with Hage's style of storytelling, as he tends to fall overmuch on the side of comedy and absurdity, and while those are likely necessary traits to accommodate oneself to the dark shadow of death's proximity, I find them less than appealing being of a more morbid nature. There are parts of this book that are thoughtful and emotional, and there are even relatively intriguing discussions of serious ideas and concepts, but the overall feel of the book is probably best exemplified by Pavlov's conversations with the dog, Rex. I found them uninspired and trite, not at all humorous or meaningful. We all deal with death, in the real or the abstract, in our own way, but I prefer something with more depth than I found here.

[Annie · Rating 4 out of 5]

The Lebanese Civil War broke out in 1975 and continued for the next fifteen years. Rawi Hage’s Beirut Hellfire Society takes place in 1978, as bombs fall on the city and factions turn Beirut into so many front lines that it’s almost impossible to venture much beyond one’s own neighborhood. This episodic and heartbreaking novel centers on Pavlov, the son of an unusual narrator who provides cremations for people who have either been refused a traditional Christian or Muslim burial or who want something that’s not traditional. Pavlov carries on his father’s work and tries to deliver some mercy in a city that is quickly becoming an apocalypse...

Read the rest of my review at A Bookish Type. I received a free copy of this book from the publisher via NetGalley, for review consideration.

[Sween McDervish · Rating 5 out of 5]

A poetic, pensive novel about life and death (but mostly death) in Beirut during the Lebanon Civil War. Our protagonist, Pavlov, the undertaker's son, who identifies more with dogs than people, watches the parade of coffins below the family's window as bombs fall everywhere, continuously. He takes over when one falls on his father, and the story weaves tales told by intriguing characters that come to the undertaker, some to bury their loved ones, some to prepare bizarre advance directives, which Pavlov executes faithfully when the moment arrives. This novel requires a little patience in the early going, but well worth the perseverance.

[Sue Dix · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is my first Rawi Hage, but not my last. The absurdity and chaos of trying to live in a city in the midst of war is brilliantly conveyed through a writing style that is frenetic, poetic, often energetic, and insane. Pavlov is a relatable, somewhat unreliable, sometimes lovable, main character. I highly recommend this disturbing, important novel.