![]() This is, after all, a book of the dead-told in a series of haunting, incendiary episodes a chronicle of bodies, and their desires and fragilities traced through a spring, summer, fall and winter in the midst of the Lebanese civil war.īefore he is killed, Pavlov's father initiates his son into the ceremonies and rituals of the Hellfire Society, a necessarily secretive entity, whose central purpose is to offer funereal rites to the many whose lives have been deemed ungrievable by the clergy or the state. The munitions have a certain primitive sentience about them – avoiding particular objects and people, a church bell, for instance, or the barber "boiling the morning Arabic coffee"– and a murderous penchant for others, like the man on the dock with "filthy feet in Roman sandals", and the five men who congregated every morning at the barbershop, and Pavlov's father, an undertaker, who at the precise moment of his death had been digging a grave for one of the many wasted souls in a seemingly endless internecine conflict. The bombs "gathered in the air, suspended, indecisive, assessing their targets and for a fraction of a second they formed a trinity witnessed only by Pavlov, the man whose name declared his preference for dogs over humans". There is a moment near the beginning of Beirut Hellfire Society, Rawi Hage's excoriating fourth novel, when three devastating missiles are fired toward the east side of Beirut. ![]()
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