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De Niro’s Game: A Novel by Rawi Hage

De Niro’s Game is set in the very depths of the Lebanese civil war, on the Christian side, narrated by Bassam, who at the beginning of the account has already lost his father and grand-father to the war. His father was killed in the family kitchen, where a bomb landed and “made a wide-open hole in the wall, giving us a splendid view of the vast sky”, which they don’t plan to fix until the winter. Bombs are constantly falling, snipers constantly need to be evaded. Bassam’s small act of fatalistic defiance is a refusal to seek shelter in the cellar along with his mother and everyone else when the bombing gets close. And he has a point: regardless of the precautions one takes (or doesn’t), death seems to come largely arbitrarily, without much rhyme or reason.

De Niro’s Game - Rawi Hage.