Beirut Hellfire Society

May 15, 2019
An undertaker manages his grimly booming business in Beirut in 1978. Hage's fourth novel (Carnival, 2013, etc.) concerns Pavlov, the son of the longtime operator of the Beirut Hellfire Society, which surreptitiously moves the bodies of those killed by sectarian violence, regardless of religious or political affiliation, to a remote crematorium. When his father is himself killed by a bomb, Pavlov continues the business with a stolid determination. Following a year in his life, the novel is more episodic than plotted, constructed on piercing character studies of the corpses he's obliged to take care of and the surviving locals who leave Pavlov either bemused or heartsick. A self-declared libertine who catalogs his sexual transgressions in lurid detail wants his funeral to involve his body hanging above a massive party; another man wants his ashes spread in the same place as those of the gay son he disowned; a married woman wants to be secretly buried next to her lover; a woman whose entire family was killed becomes mute and shellshocked, camping on the steps of Pavlov's building. Pavlov himself is targeted by a Christian militiaman, and a life defined by death soon wears on him: He hears the voice of his dog talking to him, and he's increasingly entangled in the lives of his extended family members. (A cousin has a laugh like a hyena; man's animalistic nature, from Pavlov's nickname on down, is a recurring theme.) Despite the mordant mood, there's something vivifying for both the reader and Pavlov alike in these vignettes, a sense that our thoughts about death are the true crucible for our lives, even if our hero is left unimpressed with humanity by the experience. Asked by a militiaman what he believes in, he says flatly, "I believe in dogs." A well-turned seriocomic tale about death in a place where it's become inescapable.

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August 5, 2019
After his eccentric undertaker father is killed by a stray artillery shell, Pavlov, a brooding and isolated young man, assumes control of the family business in Beirut in this potent novel from Hage (De Niro’s Game). Pavlov’s new responsibilities are accompanied by an invitation to join the secretive Hellfire Society, an order of outcasts and libertines that relied on Pavlov’s father and his hidden crematorium to give them proper funerals. Told over the course of 1978, the story is crafted with a filmmaker’s touch, favoring bold characters and colorful drama to depict the human cost of Lebanon’s civil war. Pavlov accepts the Society’s invitation without hesitation, and soon becomes a makeshift fixer for Beirut’s broken-beyond-repair: a would-be assassin requests his ashes be mingled with his dead son’s; a wealthy widow plans to be exhumed and relocated to the side of her dead lover; the sons of a murdered communist hope to cremate their mother who was denied a grave by religious authorities. Pavlov’s strange responsibilities quickly bring him into conflict with a disturbed militiaman and a violent drug dealer, challenging the carefully cultivated detachment he wears as armor. Hage’s novel is a brisk, surreal, and often comic plunge into surviving the absurd nihilism of war.

Starred review from June 1, 2019
Although the characters in this novel are fictitious, the final sentence of Hage's (Carnival, 2013) spectacular novel acknowledges, this is a book of mourning for the many who witnessed senseless wars, and for those who perished in those wars. For the Lebanon-born, Canadian-domiciled, International IMPAC Dublin Award winner Hage, real-life experiences surely drive his fiction, for he witnessed nine of the 15-plus years of the Lebanese Civil War. What he's undoubtedly accepted is that life's only certainty is death. For second-generation Beirut undertaker Pavlov, death is his inherited livelihood. Like his late father, Pavlov enables the final journey for outcast cadavers no one else will touch. After his father's death, Pavlov, too, is visited by the Hellfire Society, whose libertine members?with Pavlov's cooperation?will likely return to ashes and dust in a remote mountainous crematorium. Between his undertaking care of drug dealers and drug takers, murderers and mourners, Pavlov navigates a surreal reality of dropping bombs, brutal family feuds, dangerous liaisons, occasional companionship with a gentle (albeit murderous) prostitute, the ephemeral Lady of the Stairs, and his loyal (if ghostly) dog. Death binds them all, Hage's visceral reminder that beyond money, power, religion, and war, we are nothing more than corpses to either let rot or set aflame.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2019, American Library Association.)

August 16, 2019

Winner of the International IMPAC Dublin Literary Award, Canadian Lebanese author Hage sets his raw and startling new work in 1970s Beirut. The city is being heavily bombed, with the cemetery accommodating three or four funerals a day. Yet while Pavlov's undertaker father does bury the dead, he prefers secretly offering cremations (fire being "the closest thing to what a man feels when love exists"), performed in the mountains with respectful ceremony. Then the undertaker himself is killed by a bomb while grave digging, and soon thereafter Pavlov is visited by the libertine El-Marquis, who asks him to take up his father's work with the secretive Hellfire Society and put to rest those denied burial for their religious beliefs or sexual practices. Graphically depicted here, the society's flagrant behavior can seem less fun-filled than grimly challenging to tyrannical rule and a world at war, and Pavlov gravely assumes his responsibilities, treasuring his quiet routine as around him death becomes ordinary. A surreal touch: he and his dog (then his dog's ghost) have chats. VERDICT Hage's dark, episodic tale of bomb-stunned Beirut bites down unrelentingly on the less pleasant aspects of human behavior, with Pavlov observing that "humans deserved their burials, their darkness and their extinction." Not easy reading, but the important truths, untrammeled honesty, and fire-bright defiance keep one engrossed. [See Prepub Alert, 1/14/19.]--Barbara Hoffert, Library Journal

Copyright 2019 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

August 16, 2019

Winner of the International IMPAC Dublin Literary Award and finalist for the Scotiabank Giller Prize and the Governor General's Literary Award, Canadian Lebanese author Hage sets his latest work in 1970s Beirut, where the son of an undertaker serves as witness to a collapsing country. After his fathers' death, peaceable bookworm Pavlov is asked to take up his fathers' work and help the secretive, religion-resisting Hellfire Society put to rest those denied burial for their religious beliefs or sexual practices.

Copyright 2019 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.