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A review by nerdese
DeNiro's Game by Rawi Hage
3.0
I’ve wavered over this one. This is a difficult novel to rate accurately since different aspects of struck or repelled me for entirely different reasons. There’s something remarkable in Rawi Hage’s prose and its sense of detachment. He is never trite or sentimental about war. It is always straightforward and brutal, in the way a person who fully witnessed it can communicate. There is death and torture and gore and ten thousand bombs falling all the time, and the writing certainly evokes the banality of it all. Another bomb, another death, another loss.
The division of the story into three parts/“places” didn’t always work for me, but I did find Bassam’s time in Paris in the third part the most engaging, and after reading slowly through the first two parts, finished the last within the span of a day. While the first two deal with the horrors of war on the ground and the unthinkable things people can do to ensure their survival, the plot itself didn’t feel as grounded. There were many characters coming and going, and it wasn’t always easy to follow what Bassam and George were up to at any given time. Given the book copy’s emphasis on the diverging fates of the two men, I thought the book would play up those parallels more, but this wasn’t the case in my interpretation, given the story was told through only one man’s eyes.
This book has a strange kind of tragedy to it. So many fates are out of the control of the characters, and yet, nobody is fully innocent either. Bassam could surely be seen as a villain whose only language is violence and intimidation. His attitude towards women is repulsive, which in turn repelled me from him as a character. There’s no black-and-white good and evil here. Everyone does things to protect others and themselves, and there are many costs. That makes this a less straightforward read, and one that is harder to objectively “like.”
Hage is undoubtedly a gifted writer whose style is perfectly suited to a story set in a place of such upheaval. This book is not an easy read, and not one suited to every kind of reader, but I can certainly see why it received such universal acclaim, both in Canada and internationally.
The division of the story into three parts/“places” didn’t always work for me, but I did find Bassam’s time in Paris in the third part the most engaging, and after reading slowly through the first two parts, finished the last within the span of a day. While the first two deal with the horrors of war on the ground and the unthinkable things people can do to ensure their survival, the plot itself didn’t feel as grounded. There were many characters coming and going, and it wasn’t always easy to follow what Bassam and George were up to at any given time. Given the book copy’s emphasis on the diverging fates of the two men, I thought the book would play up those parallels more, but this wasn’t the case in my interpretation, given the story was told through only one man’s eyes.
This book has a strange kind of tragedy to it. So many fates are out of the control of the characters, and yet, nobody is fully innocent either. Bassam could surely be seen as a villain whose only language is violence and intimidation. His attitude towards women is repulsive, which in turn repelled me from him as a character. There’s no black-and-white good and evil here. Everyone does things to protect others and themselves, and there are many costs. That makes this a less straightforward read, and one that is harder to objectively “like.”
Hage is undoubtedly a gifted writer whose style is perfectly suited to a story set in a place of such upheaval. This book is not an easy read, and not one suited to every kind of reader, but I can certainly see why it received such universal acclaim, both in Canada and internationally.