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| Hearsay: |
Rawi Hage is the first Canadian since Alistair MacLeod to win the prestigious prize. All congratulations to him. Read some prize buildup and what the judges had to say.
In this remarkable novel, however, luck is a central element. The title refers to the game of chance – to the death-defying game of Russian Roulette played by DeNiro in the film The Deer Hunter. Hage’s characters find themselves in a very different yet equally extreme situation – caught in the civil war raging in Beirut in the 1980’s. Hage’s writing allows the reader a shocking intimacy with the personal impact of such conflicts. Through the fate of his anti-heroes, George and Bassam, he shows how war can envelope lives – how one doesn’t have a choice in such situations. Concepts of guilt and innocence are left to flounder in the hail of bombs and the struggle for survival. Life itself becomes a game with no real winners, only scarred survivors whose estrangement is deeper than any bullet wound, and whose future seems darker than their blacked out city.
De Niro’s Game is also a compassionate novel of friendship and betrayal, of love and loss. The war-torn city of Beirut plays host to the bravura of the young men- a city full of marauding militia, cleverly compared with the mad dogs that also haunt its precincts – a city that gradually drags its inhabitants into the blood-red sands of extreme situations and heart-breaking betrayal.
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June 12th, 2008 at 9:05 am
Speaking of crap that wins awards (see my Giller post).
June 12th, 2008 at 2:21 pm
Nicole, DENIRO’S GAME doesn’t fit the profile you sketched out in your Giller post, so I’m not sure why you sent us back to it. Care to elaborate?
June 12th, 2008 at 3:35 pm
Okay, that does it, from now on I’m writing in my third language (in my case that’d be either Hebrew or Yiddish.
June 13th, 2008 at 6:06 am
there is poetic justice to reading that Rawi Hage just defeated Margaret Atwood to win the 2008 IMPAC Dublin, after she had seemingly orchestrated–with the help of Alice Monroe–his loss at the Giller for the benefit of the big Publishing houses’ nominee. If you recall both her and Monroe withdrew from the competition that year, and she personally walked down the aisle with Lam, then awarded him the Giller personally (which was never done before.) Lam, it turned out, had met her on a cruise ship where he was working as a physician, and she had personally helped him get published.
June 13th, 2008 at 7:28 am
Not sure how Munro and Atwood excusing themselves from that award should point to a scandal. Munro was on the jury, though, that year with Adrienne Clarkson and Michael Winter, whose is acknowledged in Lam’s winning book. Whatever happened that year was surely not as clean as it could have been.
June 13th, 2008 at 8:37 am
Hage winning all these accolades gave me pause for thought about
the fact that he is an ‘untrained’ writer ie. never attended a
university creative writing program, in fact he was trained as a photographer.
June 13th, 2008 at 10:26 am
I don’t understand the tone of these comments. Have you read the book? It is extremely good, the guy’s relatively young, it was published by a smallish house… What’s there to go off on a tangent about who fixes the winner of prizes.
Mary
June 14th, 2008 at 12:55 pm
Nicole mentioned books about past wars, and although the Lebanese war Mr. Hage is talking about only took place in the late 70’s, that makes it, technically I guess, a historical war story.
But the problem is really the over-importance of all these prizes. We take part in the fraud that they are there to promote ‘literature,’ but in fact all they do is promote the winner and one or two titles from the shortlist (if we’re lucky).
So, if the prizes have become a closed-door club, that pretty much makes our literature a closed-door club. If you want to be a success, you have to join the party…..