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T HE NEW YORK TIMES INTERNATIONAL EDITION TUESDAY, AUGUST 13, 2019 | 15culture
Morro da Providência is one of Rio de Ja-
neiro’s oldest favelas. For Gláucia da
Silva, a young classical musician, the 30-
minute hike from the base of the favela
to her mother’s house follows a steep in-
cline and a walkway lined with large bul-
let holes.
“There’s a lot of violence here, and I’m
worried that I may get caught up in it,”
Ms. da Silva, 19, said while practicing
Mozart’s third violin concerto in her
room. She often covers her violin case
with a colorful scarf, “so that the police
won’t confuse it for a weapon.” (As The
Times reported earlier this year, police
officers in Rio de Janeiro gunned down
558 people during the first four months
of 2019, nearly five killings a day.)
Ms. da Silva plays in a quartet called
Orquestra de Rua (Orchestra of the
Street), alongside other classical musi-
cians from Rio’s favelas. They met
through a local youth music initiative,
som + eu, and have bonded over playing
in Rio’s streets and subways, starting
two years ago outside a pizzeria near
one of their universities. In 20 minutes,
playing a medley of classical and pop
hits, they were able to earn enough
money for the all-you-can-eat buffet,
and bring some extra income home for
their families.
“Every time I play with the group, I
feel like I’m around people who under-
stand what it means to be a classical mu-
sician in this city,” Ms. da Silva said.
Jessica D’ornellas, 21, is the group’s
violist. “My mother used to force me to
play when I was a kid,” she said. “But Ieventually began to love it and pursue it
full time.” Now she studies at the univer-
sity level, as do the rest of the quartet.
But in early May, President Jair Bol-
sonaro announced a significant budget
freeze for federal universities, such as
the one Ms. D’ornellas attends, Univer-
sidade Federal do Rio de Janeiro. Stu-
dents, including the members of
Orquestra da Rua, took to the streets
across Brazil, leading some of the larg-
est protests in the country since Mr. Bol-
sonaro’s election.
Lucas Freitos Nascimento, 21, plays
the cello. He bought his instrument with
money earned from teaching musiclessons, “but it’s not the best,” he said. “A
good one will cost you 12,000 reais” —
roughly $3,000 — “and none of us can af-
ford that.”
“The cello has kept me safe in the
favelas,” said Mr. Nascimento, who
grew up in the Morro dos Macacos
neighborhood. “It’s like a refuge when
bad things are happening around me.”In addition to practicing, performing,
teaching and studying, the members of
Orquestra da Rua also volunteer at a
youth center, leading weekly workshops
for the children in Morro da
Providência. In the last year, they were
able to raise enough money to pay for a
piano and other instruments for the kids
to use.
Juliane Nascimento de Souza, 21,
comes from a musical family. “My
grandfather played violin in the church
and has been an inspiration for me,” she
said while taking a break from practic-
ing on her family’s terrace in
Mangueira, a community known for
having some of the country’s best
samba schools. “People are always
shocked that I’m a classical musician
because most people here play samba,”
Ms. de Souza said. “Nobody expects a
black, poor woman to play the violin.”
Carlos Vainer, an urban planning pro-
fessor at the Rio de Janeiro Federal Uni-
versity, leads an inter-university music
and art program and invited Orquestra
da Rua to perform at a recent event.
“The current political leadership is
threatening funding for music and the
arts in all public universities,” Mr.
Vainer told the audience. “Music is a
public asset, and groups like the Orques-
tra da Rua are showing us that music
and the arts need to be available to ev-
eryone in our society.”
Though the future of music funding
may be in jeopardy, Ms. D’ornellas still
thinks about the places her viola might
take her. “I want to one day play Euro-
pean cities like Berlin,” the musician
said, while her fiancé sat close to her in
their apartment. “It’s always been my
dream.”Bringing classical music to Rio’s favelas
RIO DE JANEIROSamba rules, so ‘nobody
expects a black, poor
woman to play the violin’BY WALTER THOMPSON-HERNÁNDEZPHOTOGRAPHS BY WALTER THOMPSON-HERNÁNDEZ/THE NEW YORK TIMESClockwise from top: the quartet after a performance; Mr. Nascimento teaching local children in the Morro dos Macacos favela; and
Ms. D’ornellas, right, heading to school with her fiancée.Above, the members of Orquestra de Rua
in Rio de Janeiro: Lucas Freitas Nasci-
mento, front, and, from left, Gláucia da
Silva, Jessica D’ornellas and Juliane
Nascimento de Souza. Left, the four
perform regularly around the city.“Groups like the Orquestra da
Rua are showing us that music
and the arts need to be available
to everyone in our society.”Standing on his balcony, Pavlov, the
20-year-old at the center of Rawi
Hage’s fourth novel, “Beirut Hellfire
Society,” hears from the street below
“tales of combat deaths, sniper deaths,
deaths by misadventure, old age, acci-
dents, car crashes, massacres, drown-
ing, collapsing houses, stillbirth,
hunger and gluttony, execution,
slaughter.”
But “grim” is, somehow, the last
word one might use to describe this
book. Set in 1978, in the early years of
the Lebanese Civil War, it draws on
Hage’s antic, many-voiced gifts to
make a chronicle of war and unrelent-
ing death into a provocative entertain-
ment.
Pavlov is an undertaker, a profession
he inherited from his father, and his
balcony sits above the road that leadsto the cemetery. He is witness to fre-
quent processions of mourners, and
eavesdrops on their laments for fight-
ers and civilians.
His father had been a member of the
Hellfire Society, a secretive, heretical
group that, among other activities,
buries and cremates outcasts of vari-
ous stripes, including atheists and gay
people.
“Laughter should be permissible
under all circumstances,” Pavlov says,
in what serves as a succinct motto for
Hage and his work. It might be more
accurate to call this author irreverent
rather than funny, but the qualities
obviously overlap.
Pavlov’s father is digging a grave
when a bomb falls nearby, killing him
and sending him straight into the fresh
pit meant for another. What’s left of a
dead priest after another bombing is
kept for burial until his missing head
can be found. (“The head of a potential
saint is a valuable thing to keep!”
Hage writes. “Just imagine the conver-
sations one might have with a bodiless
priest.”) Pavlov’s hearse (the “death-
mobile,” he calls it) has a broken wind-
shield and bullet-pocked doors.
In an early section typical of thestory’s choral construction, a hedonist
founder of the Hellfire Society named
El-Marquis delivers a long speech to
Pavlov. Members of the society, he
says, “have no illusions, no aspirations
to flatter some God. Bodily urges are
part of our nature, and we should
never think of resisting them.”
El-Marquis is so skilled at not resist-
ing that he asks for his body — after
his death; he’s not crazy — to be
dressed in a gown and dangled from
the ceiling of his house while an orgias-
tic feast (and an actual orgy) rages
beneath him. The request is honored,
and thoroughly described.
Post-party, El-Marquis also wishes
to be cremated, and the desire to avoid
traditional burial is a recurring theme
in the novel. “Earth and the ground are
overrated,” Pavlov remembers his
father saying. “It is smoke that mat-
ters, that fleeing gesture of escape that
reaches beyond lands and borders and
claimed territories.”
Hage’s childhood played out against
the first half or so of the Lebanese war.
He left Beirut in 1982, when he was 18,
and settled in Montreal, where he still
lives, in 1992. His fictions have been set
in Lebanon and Canada. His first nov-el, “De Niro’s Game” (2006), about two
Christian friends growing up during
the Lebanese conflict, won the Interna-
tional Dublin Impac Literary Award,
one of the world’s most lucrative book
prizes. “Beirut Hellfire Society” is the
third of his novels to be nominated for
the Giller Prize, Canada’s top English-
language literary honor.
Muslim and Christian groups fight
against each other and among them-selves in this new novel, and factional-
ism sits in the center of Hage’s satirical
cross hairs. “Everyone deals with this
place as if it’s theirs,” he writes. “Ev-
eryone is everything but Lebanese.”
In one of the book’s funniest mo-
ments, a scene that could have come
straight out of Monty Python, a priest
and a sheikh stand above a grave for
three hours, “trading rituals and pray-
ers” in order to “outmaneuver the
other so that he could recite his reli-
gion’s prayer last.”
This sense of absurdity is joined by a
Rabelaisian streak. At one fantastical
point, the corpse of El-Marquis asks a
mirror to flatter him, and a “voice rose
out of the abyss of the bathroom’s
drain and screamed back”; what it
screams is a staccato page-and-a-half’s
worth of words that would make
George Carlin blush.
Hage doesn’t shy from descriptions
like that of bombs turning humans into
“butcher’s meat — chuck steak, rib,
lower sirloin, flank, shoulder.”
There is more than a dash of magic
in his approach as well. Dogs talk to
Pavlov. (Fair warning that animals in
the novel ultimately fare little better
than humans.)In a recent interview, Hage spoke
about readers’ expectations of fiction
set in distant, war-torn lands, and how
they often want journalistic reports
masquerading as novels, as opposed to
his more burlesque approach. But
there is no mistaking the real heart-
break and waste that are Hage’s ma-
terial, or his outrage at the most costly,
terrible and seemingly inexpugnable
qualities of humanity.
His style is loose and extravagant
enough — a bit looser here than in
some of his previous work — that
when he does deliver a hard epigram-
matic truth, it hits with special force:
“We only kill each other to see our-
selves as heroes in our fathers’
stories.”
Those stories — a recurring word —
and their “inherited sadnesses” are the
somber pulse beneath this novel’s
more chaotic and unexpectedly upbeat
energy.
“What a naïve species we are,”
Pavlov thinks. “The stories we die for.”
But there’s an undeniable tinge of
wistfulness when another character
says: “Someday, no one will want to
tell them anymore. No one will be left
to tell them.”An absurd burlesque set amid a civil war
BOOK REVIEWBeirut Hellfire Society
By Rawi Hage. 278 pp. W.W. Norton
& Company. $26.95.BY JOHN WILLIAMSRawi Hage.BABAK SALARIР
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