De Niro's Game by Rawi Hage

One of the better books I have read this year was Per Petterson's Out Stealing Horses, which came to my attention through a number of positive mentions on literary blogs. I enjoyed it so much that I soon read Petterson's prior work, In the Wake, and I have just started his recently re-published 1996 novel, To Siberia. Part of Petterson's good press came from winning the IMPAC Dublin Award, which carries a hefty 100,000-euro purse. Thus when I saw that the 2008 winner had been announced, and was also getting some positive reviews, I thought it was worth a try.

De Niro's Game is the debut novel of Lebanese-born Canadian author Rawi Hage. Set in Beirut during the Lebanese Civil War of the late 1970s and early 1980s, the book follows two young friends, Bassam and George, who are stumbling toward adulthood in a society that lacks a rule of law or even basic behavioral norms. Readers of Khaled Hosseini's books will hear echoes of his depictions of Afghanistan, and surely there is are unfortunate parallels between any war-torn failed states:

Ten thousand bombs had landed, and I was waiting for George.

So the novel begins, with violence, and violence permeates the story through and through. When George arrives, it is to relay to Bassam a problem he has with a man monopolizing the parking in front of his aunt's home:

When he leaves, he still reserves the space for himself. I moved the two poles marking his spot so my aunt can park. So she parks, and we go up to have coffee at her place. This Chafiq fellow knocks at my aunt's door and asks her to move her car. It is his space, he says. My aunt says, It is a public space... He insults her... She shouts... I pull out my gun, put it in his face, and kick him out of the house. He runs down the stairs and threatens me from below. But we will show him, won't we, quiet man?

And indeed, later that night Bassam and George shoot holes in the man's car. Shortly thereafter, the man comes to George's aunt to apologize. And thus we see that for these boys growing up in a lawless city, violence is not just an option, it is an instinct. It is the first resort. George is and remains the more violent of the two, but as the novel passes the violence of both will escalate. It is how they interact with and understand the world; with merchants, with employers, with women.

The greater contrast is that while both are Lebanese, George is of Lebanon, he belongs to the country, feels a part of it, and has no wish to depart. Bassam's desire to leave Lebanon is made manifest in the third sentence of the book, and most of his actions thereafter are motivated toward that end: petty theft to obtain money, remaining unattached from any person or group that would hold him back. Much of the book is taken up with this quest, the challenge of obtaining enough money to depart, and the one attachment that Bassam cannot seem to escape: George. As George joins the militia and rises through the ranks, Bassam is drawn closer to that most dangerous sphere.

Hage excels at portraying this world turned upside down. Lebanon was one of the most prosperous, advanced nations in the Middle East, but a few years have utterly displaced its standards of civilization. Yet life goes on. Hage finds a strangely effective symbol of this paradox in the animals of Beirut:

Bombs fell, warriors fought, people ate, and the garbage piled up on the corners of our streets. Cats and dogs were feasting and getting fatter. The rich were leaving for France and letting their dogs roam loose on the streets: orphan dogs, expensive dogs, potty-trained dogs, dogs with French names and red bowties, fluffy dogs, well-bred dogs, china dogs, genetically modified dogs, and incestuous dogs that clung to one another in packs, covered the streets in tens, and gathered under the command of charismatic three-legged mutt. The most expensive pack of wild dogs roamed Beirut and the earth, and howled to the big moon, and ate from mountains of garbage on the corner of our streets.

It is this city turned on its side that Bassam seeks to flee, but it is not so easy to flee when the world is broken; he must endure the stress, the unexpected, and the violence himself. As with so many books, things are steady until the end, when a series of implausible revelations seek to overturn some of the reader's basic assumptions but succeed only in muddling the meaning of the acts that led Bassam and George to their eventual destinations. Still, worthy until that point and an author to keep an eye on in the future.