An undertaker manages his grimly booming enterprise in Beirut in
1978.
Hage’s fourth novel (Carnival, 2013, and so on.) issues Pavlov,
the son of the longtime operator of the Beirut Hellfire Society, which
surreptitiously strikes the our bodies of these killed by sectarian violence,
no matter non secular or political affiliation, to a distant crematorium. When
his father is himself killed by a bomb, Pavlov continues the enterprise with a
stolid willpower. Following a yr in his life, the novel is extra episodic
than plotted, constructed on piercing character research of the corpses he’s
obliged to deal with and the surviving locals who depart Pavlov both
bemused or heartsick. A self-declared libertine who catalogs his sexual
transgressions in lurid element desires his funeral to contain his physique hanging
above a large get together; one other man desires his ashes unfold in the identical place as these
of the homosexual son he disowned; a married lady desires to be secretly buried subsequent to
her lover; a girl whose total household was killed turns into mute and
shellshocked, tenting on the steps of Pavlov’s constructing. Pavlov himself is
focused by a Christian militiaman, and a life outlined by loss of life quickly wears on
him: He hears the voice of his canine speaking to him, and he’s more and more
entangled within the lives of his prolonged members of the family. (A cousin has fun
like a hyena; man’s animalistic nature, from Pavlov’s nickname on down, is a
recurring theme.) Regardless of the mordant temper, there’s one thing vivifying for
each the reader and Pavlov alike in these vignettes, a way that our ideas
about loss of life are the true crucible for our lives, even when our hero is left
unimpressed with humanity by the expertise. Requested by a militiaman what he
believes in, he says flatly, “I consider in canines.”
A well-turned seriocomic story about loss of life in a spot the place it’s
turn out to be inescapable.
