Maya Khankhoje enjoys reviewing interesting books as a way of reliving the hours she spent with them.

De Niro's Game . By Rawi Hage. 2006. House of Anasi Press.

Rawi Hage’s “De Niro’s Game” hits the reader the way Beirut was hit by “ten thousand bombs”, the leitmotiv that runs through the novel and is the backdrop for the life of its main protagonists, Bassam and George. They are childhood friends, but as they grow up and face the rites of passage that life imposes on them, one chooses one path, the other, another one. Their friendship and their lives will henceforth bifurcate as has been the case with the ties and lives of thousands of refugees from war-torn Lebanon and adjacent regions.

The story is told from Bassam’s point of view, whom we can presume to be the alter-ego of Hage, the author and survivor of nine years of civil war in Lebanon – which, as I write these lines, is still reeling under the assassination of its Prime Minister. The plot is simple: two young men eke out a living as best they can and spend their leisure hours ogling women in balconies or fantasising about each other’s female friends and relatives. They are frustrated and charged with the potent brew of adrenalin and testosterone that violence seems to breed in young disaffected males. Ultimately one of them chooses money and power in a corrupt militia at the cost of his integrity, while the other one simply wants out, at the cost of the ties that bind him to the country he loves so dearly.

We are told that English is Rawi Hage’s third language and that he became a writer because his father loved poetry and his parents had lots of books at home. And it shows: his writing is informed by the wealth and passion of Arabic poetry, the Cartesian logic of the French language and the pragmatism of English. Goethe once said that to truly know your mother tongue, you needed to learn other languages. In Hage’s case, his knowledge of his mother tongue has enriched English, his working medium. And of course, his writing is also influenced by his photographer’s eye.

De Niro’s Game is a fast-paced, action-filled, gut-wrenching novel bound to appeal to actor De Niro fans. But it is anything but a game. It is a meditation on war, violence, human volition, and sheer existentialism. It is a sideline marking the hardship that women face during war as they grapple to scrounge for food and precious water in an economy that has been completely destroyed. It is also proof that violence and the objectification of women –and there is a lot of the latter in the way these two young men relate to them – are two sides of the same coin.

Montreal Serai is proud to review Rawi Hage’s first and well acclaimed novel, because Hage, like Shyam Selvadurai and Jaspreet Singh, first published some of his early work in our Ezine which celebrates its 20 th Anniversary this year.