Reviews tagging 'Death'

De Niro's Game by Rawi Hage

4 reviews

franksreads's review against another edition

adventurous challenging dark emotional informative sad tense fast-paced

• Plot- or character-driven? A mix
• Strong character development? It's complicated
• Loveable characters? Yes
• Diverse cast of characters? Yes
• Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes

5.0

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Content Warnings

Graphic: Grief, Animal death, Alcoholism, Animal cruelty, Toxic friendship, Sexual harassment, Racism, Death of parent, Domestic abuse, Drug abuse, Stalking, Islamophobia, Gun violence, Colonisation, Death, Drug use, Xenophobia, War, Violence, Torture, Religious bigotry, Physical abuse, Misogyny, and Kidnapping

ndreher's review against another edition

challenging dark emotional sad tense medium-paced

• Plot- or character-driven? A mix
• Strong character development? It's complicated
• Loveable characters? It's complicated
• Diverse cast of characters? Yes
• Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes

3.75

It's a bit too pulp fiction style for my taste although the final part (Paris) brings some of the thug tendencies of the characters into reflective light. Still, a graphic and heavy telling of the darkness of the Lebanese civil war. The final section also brings a more surreal, internal world element to the protagonists storytelling that is intriguing but comes as a surprise as it's largely missing from the beginning of the novel. 

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Content Warnings

Graphic: Torture, Blood, Death of parent, Drug use, Drug abuse, Rape, Sexual assault, Sexual content, Sexual violence, War, Death, Emotional abuse, Hate crime, Schizophrenia/Psychosis , Violence, Grief, Genocide, and Gun violence

katkatniss's review against another edition

adventurous dark reflective sad tense fast-paced

• Plot- or character-driven? A mix
• Strong character development? It's complicated
• Loveable characters? It's complicated
• Diverse cast of characters? It's complicated
• Flaws of characters a main focus? It's complicated

4.75

One of the best, most surprising and most shocking books I’ve ever read in terms of style and technique. (It's like my writing but more poignant and concise and beautiful and everything you admire and want to achieve in your own work amplified ten thousand times [get the allusion?]. Some stylistic choices made are so similar to mine, it's incredible. It's like looking in the mirror and seeing the ideal you, but ten thousand times smarter and more beautiful)

The romanticization of lives, young and broken and dreaming amid a horrific war, the detachment, the emotionlessness of the unreliable narrator, it hits different. It goes off on tangents, in stream-of-conciousness and almost post-modern imaginations and rambles, in a confusion of reality and speech and imagination and past trauma and present horrors. Yet it never loses its focus. And it is all made very, very, shockingly beautiful.

Particular aspects of the book remind me of The Haunting of Hill House (the loneliness, the absence of a home), The Bell Jar (the jumbling of past and present, the numbness, the numb sadness) and The Cather in the Rye (the anguish, the confusion, the mistakes and being lost in the world), although De Niro's Game discusses themes very different from these books mentioned. Simply genius.

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Content Warnings

Moderate: Gun violence, War, Confinement, Death of parent, Suicide, Sexual violence, Child death, Death, Drug abuse, Drug use, Sexual content, Torture, Violence, and Blood

Minor: Xenophobia

martinza's review against another edition

challenging dark sad medium-paced

• Plot- or character-driven? A mix
• Strong character development? N/A
• Loveable characters? No
• Diverse cast of characters? No
• Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes

3.75

The characters are lost and cold

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Content Warnings

Graphic: Death of parent, Emotional abuse, Injury/Injury detail, Murder, Suicide, Death, Gun violence, Misogyny, Sexual harassment, Sexual violence, Toxic friendship, Physical abuse, Stalking, Violence, War, and Sexual assault