But the father picked up a key from under a potted plant, opened the door, and together he and his son entered. They arrived at a secluded area in the high summit, and finally at a small stone house that looked to be abandoned. He switched on the car radio, and drove towards the coast and then up into the mountains of Lebanon. Now, the man told his son, you’re sixteen-old enough to become a member of the Society.

Father and son gathered the scattered items that belonged to the dead: a loose shoe, a bag filled with mouldy food, broken glasses. The cadaver’s belly had been opened by a bullet wound and vermin had claimed it and multiplied inside the soft organs, gorging on the entrails. The son, who was named Pavlov, and his father, an undertaker, loaded the remains into plastic bags and carried them to the hearse. One sunny day at the start of a ceasefire, a father drove with his son down towards where the fighting had been.Ī cadaver had been lying on the ground for days, mutilated. Reproduced by arrangement with the publisher. Knopf Canada, a division of Penguin Random House Canada Limited. I believe a novelist writes for the void, and must inhale the whole world fully, in order to substitute it with another.Įxcerpted from Beirut Hellfire Society by Rawi Hage. To imagine a reader in the act of writing is to put a restraint on your favourite, possibly filthy, improvised character. My feeling is that a novelist doesn’t write for anyone in particular, but for many different possible people and in service of the complex universe the writer seeks to create. I wonder if the appropriate question might be: Who are you writing against? Who are you trying to undermine, transform, humiliate or love in that exclusive zone of freedom on the page, where only a facsimile of reality exists? To me, the question “Who are you writing for?” suggests that the novelist’s ultimate goal is to produce a work that is narrowly partisan instead of containing multiple interpretations, Manichaean instead of universal, parochial instead of cosmopolitan, and limited to its concern to please.

I’ve been asked this question many times throughout my writing career, and have always felt a little bewildered as to how to answer. During the weeks leading up to the event, Maclean’s will publish an excerpt from each shortlisted writer, along with their answer to this one question: Who are you writing for, who is your imagined or intended reader ? Here is Hage’s response. The winner will be announced at the Writers’ Trust Awards ceremony in Toronto on November 7. Rawi Hage is nominated for the Rogers Writers’ Trust Fiction Prize for his novel Beirut Hellfire Society, “ a powerful exploration of the nature of death and what comes next,” in the words of the prize jury. Rawi Hage is nominated for the 2018 Rogers Writers’ Trust Fiction Prize for his novel ‘Beirut Hellfire Society’ (Babak Salari)

Beirut hellfire society