Dreams of Roma
I’m not sure how many of us imagine ourselves as conquering generals, ordering troops to massacre entire cities and thereby cleansing the country of the aristocracy. Yet, the main character in De Niro’s Game manages to have such images of grandeur while also remaining entirely sympathetic to the reader. Set in the midst of Lebanon’s civil war, De Niro’s Game is an amazing, multi-leveled story boy Rawi Hage. The book is accessible from many different standpoints: cultural references to The Deer Hunter and Robert De Niro; historical allusions such as the French Revolution; philosophy and literature as when Bassam reads Camus’ L’Etranger.
Yet, what I find most compelling about the book is the way Bassam seems to living in multiple layers of reality. From the very first chapter of the book Bassam sees events in the physical world as connecting with another philosophical or anagogical world. Roma is a city of great importance, though what that importance is I have yet to fathom though in my mind it is reminiscent of the poem Sailing to Byzantium by William Butler Yeats.
Despite the appearance of this dual reality, the real culmination of Bassam’s overlapping realities comes when he is in France. As he travels Paris he sees himself as a conquering general, cutting off the heads of noblemen and winning the revolution singlehandedly. Though the reader may doubt, as I did, that Bassam’s gripe on sanity was slipping, the doubts become lost as a complicated web of international terrorism is revealed. It is not so far fetched to see Bassam’s rebellious act of escaping the polarized country of his birth as revolutionary. He is the revolution of the revolution, precisely because he is a child of the revolution, having grown up and come to age in the midst of sectarian violence. Fighting communists, working with Jews, killing Muslims, none of it mattered because all of it amounted to was petty thieving, ruthless killing, and tiny men trying to make themselves kings of the garbage dump. The city Bassam grew up in was mere rubble, with bombs instead of stars, and bullet casings instead of marbles to trade.
Perhaps the most compelling part of the novel was its rich language and Bassam’s poetry-like stream of consciousness. If I took the time to look more closely at the analogies and imagery employed by Hage I am sure the richness of the text would become even fuller. But the simple act of reading this novel was so pleasurable that I am trying to get all of my friends to read it.
