Beirut Hellfire Society

by Rawi Hage

Overview

"Truly a masterpiece." —Lawrence Joseph

On a ravaged street overlooking a cemetery in a Christian enclave in war-torn 1970s Beirut, we meet Pavlov, the son of a local undertaker. When his father dies suddenly, Pavlov is approached by a member of the mysterious Hellfire Society—an anti-religious sect that arranges secret burial for outcasts denied last rites because of their religion or sexuality. Pavlov agrees to take on his father's work for the society, and over the course of the novel he becomes a survivor-chronicler of his embattled and faded community at the heart of Lebanon's civil war.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781324002925
Publisher:	Norton, W. W. & Company, Inc.
Publication date:	04/25/2025
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
Pages:	272
File size:	2 MB

About the Author

Rawi Hage  is the author of four novels. Beirut Hellfire Society was longlisted for the Scotiabank Giller Prize, shortlisted for the Rogers Writers' Trust Fiction Prize, and a finalist for the Governor General's Literary Award. Born in Beirut, Lebanon, Hage now lives in Montreal.

Editorial Reviews

…[Beirut Hellfire Society] draws on Hage's antic, many-voiced gifts to make a chronicle of war and unrelenting death into a provocative entertainment…But there is no mistaking the real heartbreak and waste that are Hage's material, or his outrage at the most costly, terrible and seemingly inexpugnable qualities of humanity. His style is loose and extravagant enough—a bit looser here than in some of his previous work—that when he does deliver a hard epigrammatic truth, it hits with special force: "We only kill each other to see ourselves as heroes in our fathers' stories." Those stories—a recurring word—and their "inherited sadnesses" are the somber pulse beneath this novel's more chaotic and unexpectedly upbeat energy.

The New York Times - John Williams

"[Beirut Hellfire Society] draws on Hage's antic, many-voiced gifts to make a chronicle of war and unrelenting death into a provocative entertainment."

New York Times - John Williams

"Place: Beirut. Time: 1970s. But Rawi Hage’s Beirut Hellfire Society is, actually, deeply set in any place consumed by killing and death during any time in human history. Fire is Beirut Hellfire Society’s elemental core—inherited fires of grief and sorrow, justice and love. Fantastically framed, its envisioned images and scenes burn with a mythic intensity not easily forgotten. Truly a masterpiece."

Lawrence Joseph

"A wild, viscerally exciting and often bleakly funny novel of ideas. Comparisons aren’t always useful, but this reviewer thought of a work…equally unflinching in its de-romanticizing of a subject most of us prefer to avoid: Cormac McCarthy’s Blood Meridian."

Montreal Gazette

"[A] hell of a story.… Pavlov is an irresistible lead: stony, well-read, tightly controlled, with a deep well of sadness. Call him Harry Bosch but in Lebanon."

Los Angeles Times - Nathan Deuel

"[A] playfully scabrous novel that draws nearly as much from Nabokov as from Lebanon’s grisly civil war.… The writing is bravura, the humor, stygian and the thrill of expression, triumphant."

NPR - Neda Ulaby

"Beirut Hellfire Society crackles with the kinetic energy of a dancer.… The absurd volume of deaths is also tempered by [Rawi] Hage’s signature dark humor and stylistic playfulness."

Toronto Star

"Hallucinatory.… [A] faceted meditation on existentialism."

Wall Street Journal - Sam Sacks

2019-04-28
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.

Kirkus Reviews