Hage, Rawi 1964-

PERSONAL:

Born 1964 in Beirut, Lebanon; immigrated to Canada, 1992. Ethnicity: Lebanese. Education: Attended New York Institute of Photography; Dawson College, A.D.; Concordia University, B.A.

ADDRESSES:

Home—Montreal, Quebec, Canada.

CAREER:

Photographer, writer, artist, and curator.

AWARDS, HONORS:

De Niro's Game was short-listed for the Giller Award and the Governor General's Literary Award, both 2006; grants from the Canada Council for the Arts and the Conseil des arts et des lettres du Quebec.

WRITINGS:

De Niro's Game, Anansi (Toronto, Ontario, Canada), 2006, Steerforth Press (Hanover, NH), 2007.

Cockroach, Anansi (Toronto, Ontario, Canada), 2008.

Contributor to magazines and newspapers, including Fuse, Mizna, Jouvert, the Toronto Review, Montreal Serai, and Al-Jadid.

SIDELIGHTS:

Rawi Hage was born in Beirut, Lebanon, where he lived through the country's brutal civil war in the late 1970s and early 1980s except for a brief time spent in Cyprus. After leaving Lebanon, he spent nine years in New York City, where he studied art and photography, before settling in Montreal, Canada, in 1992. Hage became a novelist almost by accident. He was contracted by a publisher to write a book of short stories, but one of those stories—De Niro's Game—grew to novel-length proportions and subsumed the original proposal. The story takes place during Lebanon's civil war, when bombs continually rained down upon Beirut, indiscriminately killing over a hundred thousand people. Best friends Bassam and George live in the Christian sector of Beirut, where they dress in American clothes, smoke cigarettes, carry guns, and spend their days concocting a scheme to pilfer money from a local casino in order to finance their escape from the country. When George joins a Christian paramilitary group that protects their neighborhood, their friendship is strained to the breaking point. Worried by George's encroaching secrecy and paranoia, Bassam becomes estranged from his friend and his life increasingly at risk. Having previously lost his father in the war, the death of his mother prompts him to finally flee the country. He raises the funds to smuggle himself across the border by partaking in petty crime.

The book's title is inspired by the Academy Award-winning 1978 film The Deer Hunter, in which Robert De Niro's character, held prisoner by the Vietcong during the Vietnam War, is forced to play Russian roulette for the amusement of his captors. In Hage's story, it is George who adopts the nickname De Niro, for the careless way he takes chances with his life, rising through the ranks of the gangs that profit from the chaos and misery unleashed by the war. More broadly, Hage uses Russian roulette as a metaphor for the arbitrariness of war. The story also owes much to Albert Camus' The Stranger—the novel that Bassam reads when he finally escapes Beirut—in which a remorseless Frenchman kills an Arab. Bassam stands in contrast to Camus' antihero by becoming an armed Arab among the French.

De Niro's Game received good reviews and was short-listed for several literary prizes, including Canada's prestigious Giller Award. Writing in the London Guardian, Catherine Taylor said that "Hage brilliantly condenses these short, incendiary lives," and Dan Naccarato, writing in Now Toronto, applauded how "Hage's rapid jumps from one violent incident to another evoke television war coverage and expose the reader to the bleakness of the combat zone." Many reviewers remarked on the way Hage's prose evokes the senseless, mind-numbing reality of war. "Calling prose ‘flat’ is usually one of the less hurtful ways of saying that a book has sunk into eye-glazing boredom," wrote Craig Taylor in Quill & Quire, but in this case "the word flat is praise.… Hage barely wavers from a flattened, declarative style … that characterizes places where bombs rain down and most people have access to firearms.… Beirut has been flattened, and the aspirations of those who traverse its rubble have been destroyed with it." Writing in the International Fiction Review, Nouri Gana called De Niro's Game "a brilliantly crafted novel," and its author "a talented and versatile writer."

In an interview with Stefan Christoff of the Montreal-based Dominion, Hage explained that "De Niro's Game champions secularism while illustrating how ugly sectarianism is, and the corruption of organized religion." Moreover, he felt an imperative to write about the Lebanese civil war, both for the sake of those who suffered through it and for those who came after. "I like to think of the novel as a small slice of the collective memory of Lebanon," he told Christoff. "In Lebanon there was no conscious decision from the government to preserve the history of the war, to understand issues that created war in the first place."

BIOGRAPHICAL AND CRITICAL SOURCES:

PERIODICALS

Booklist, May 15, 2007, Joanne Wilkinson, review of De Niro's Game, p. 19.

Books in Canada, December, 2006, David H. Evans, review of De Niro's Game, p. 5; January 1, 2007, Nancy Wigston, review of De Niro's Game, p. 38.

Dominion (Montreal, Quebec, Canada), April 12, 2007, Stefan Christoff, review of De Niro's Game.

Entertainment Weekly, August 6, 2007, Fred McKindra, review of De Niro's Game.

Fiddlehead, summer, 2007, Steve Noyes, review of De Niro's Game.

Guardian (London, England), September 1, 2007, Catherine Taylor, review of De Niro's Game.

International Fiction Review, January, 2007, Nouri Gana, review of De Niro's Game, p. 196.

Kirkus Reviews, June 15, 2007, review of De Niro's Game.

Library Journal, July 1, 2007, Henry Bankhead, review of De Niro's Game.

Maclean's, May 29, 2006, review of De Niro's Game, p. 40.

Montreal Mirror, June 22, 2006, Juliet Waters, review of De Niro's Game.

Now Toronto, June 1, 2006, Dan Naccarato, review of De Niro's Game.

Publishers Weekly, April 16, 2007, review of De Niro's Game, p. 26.

Quill & Quire, June, 2006, Craig Taylor, review of De Niro's Game.

ONLINE

Association of English Language Publisher of Quebec Web site,http://www.aelag.org/ (February 21, 2008), Faustus Salvador, review of De Niro's Game.

CTV Web site,http://www.ctv.ca/ (November 6, 2006), "Giller Prize Nominee Bio: Rawi Hage."

January Magazine,http://www.januarymagazine.com/ (May, 2007), M. Wayne Cunningham, review of De Niro's Game.

Northwest Passages,http://www.nwpassages.com/ (February 21, 2008), Meghan Mathieson, review of De Niro's Game.