Depth of Field

For Rawi Hage, the transition from novelist to short story writer has seemed effortless. Born in Lebanon, he published his first book, De Niro’s Game, in 2006; it won the International Dublin Literary Award for its devastating depiction of battle-scarred Beirut in the early 1980s and the malaise, despondency, and despair of those caught in the conflict. Hage followed his debut with Cockroach and Carnival, both set in Montreal, or a place resembling Montreal, where the author now lives. The former is an account of a nameless immigrant from the Middle East and his impoverished life on the edges of society; the latter is narrated by a taxi driver who observes the beauty and ugliness of the world outside his car windows. With his fourth novel, Beirut Hellfire Society, from 2018, Hage returned to the city’s turbulent past to depict a secretive sect’s attempts to bury atheists and homosexuals — those who existed outside the...