It's best not to perform a Google search on Rawi Hage, or if you do, at least hide the fact from him. It's not that the Montreal writer has been involved in any high-profile scandals, or is wanted by the law in six countries; in fact, should you search for his name you'd think his life, at least recently, was quite sun-tinged.
It's just that Hage, who recently became €100,000 richer when he won the International IMPAC Dublin Literary Award for his novel De Niro's Game, feels that the Internet has distilled his essence into a few pungent bio-bytes, some of which are not true: The Lebanese-Canadian writer. Raised during the war in Beirut. Winner of the world's richest literary prize for the first book he wrote. Soon to be made into a major motion picture by Atom Egoyan. (That last part's not true; it's one of the rumours that staggers around the Internet, refusing to die.) "It's all I ask," Hage says one night at a cocktail party at the Canadian High Commission in London. "Don't Google me." He will read the following night during Toronto Stories, also featuring Priscilla Uppal and Vincent Lam, at the London Literature Festival. Is it at least true that he was born in 1964? "Let's not talk about it," he says, running one hand over his smooth scalp. "I shaved it off, it was coming in white."
The next morning, sitting at a coffee shop in Bloomsbury - a neighbourhood as rich in literary history as any in London - Hage looks suspiciously at the tape recorder in front of him. "It's okay," he says, "but I'm more likely to censor myself if it's there." He's an intriguing blend of lugubrious and funny, wary and passionate. Even at this early stage of his literary stardom, he's openly skeptical about the media, which is refreshing. Almost everyone who gets interviewed regularly is leery of journalists, often with good reason, but almost everyone is too chicken to say so. Not Hage.
"I won't answer that, it's a trick question," he says in response to a perfectly bland query about whether he knew boys like George and Bassam, the two young protagonists of his novel, who spend their lives hustling, smoking dope and dreaming of escaping the war in Beirut.
A trick question? "I've known a lot of people - one character might encompass a thousand characters that I've woven together. If I tell you yes ...." His eyes are mischievous. "I don't trust journalists any more."
What he objects to in particular is the idea that his life story - his "trajectory," as he puts it - overshadows the fictional world of his novel. He was raised in a Christian family in East Beirut, with Arabic as a first language; he studied in French. Like Bassam, his restless, rootless narrator, he longed to get out, and left for New York at 18 before moving to Montreal 10 years later. "It's not such an unusual thing," he says. "South of Sicily, everyone wants to leave."
It's dangerous to draw too many parallels between Hage and the boys in De Niro's Game. (To explain the title: George takes his nickname from the American actor, and the "game" will be familiar to anyone who's seen The Deer Hunter.) The search for real-life underpinnings makes Hage shake his head: "We're starting to give more priority to what is perceived as real than the fictitious and the imaginary. We are undermining the act of creativity."
There's no doubt that De Niro's Game is an act of creativity - "a page-turning tour de force" in the IMPAC jury's analysis - and all the more surprising because it was written in only 14 months, in Hage's third language, English.
It's part film noir, part existential shrug: "In death, everything should cease," Bassam notes while he's on the run in Paris, reading Camus. "All else is nothing but human vanity and make-believe." Absolutely it's an existential novel, says its author, who longs for a secular world and despairs that reason will ever have its days. Why not? "Because we're just territorial monkeys."
At times, Hage's wiry prose turns giddy and hallucinatory, the metaphors spiralling up to the sky. He becomes invigorated talking about Bassam's imaginary flights, which happen when he's stressed or heartbroken. "When I was a kid," Hage says, "we were in the shelter one day. We'd been there for a couple weeks and the bombing never stopped. I saw this kid who just lost it - he was about my age. I think it marked me, how people escape from crisis. You create a totally imaginary, fantastical world."
He returns to his sandwich for a moment. He's already generously given up one half of it - "I really prefer to share food" - and now he pushes the watercress garnish over to our young photographer. "Have some," he says seriously. "It's good for the libido." The photographer eyes the green specks dubiously and Hage bursts out laughing. "If pharmaceutical companies can lie all the time, why can't I?"
Periodically Hage gets e-mails from one of the Canadian publishers who rejected De Niro's Game. It's understandable - the poor man probably keeps a file of the awards the book has been nominated for (the Giller, the Governor-General's the Writers' Trust) and those it has won (the IMPAC, the Paragraphe Hugh MacLennan Prize). The novel was submitted to 10 publishers and was plucked off the "slush pile" of unsolicited manuscripts at House of Anansi Press - the literary equivalent of a glass shoe being placed delicately on the foot, followed by a long stint in a castle.
What's surprising is that for most of his life Hage wasn't a writer, he was an artist working in photography. He only turned to writing after being encouraged by a curator who'd worked with him during an ill-fated show of Arab-Canadian artists at the Canadian Museum of Civilization (the show was cancelled in the wake of Sept. 11, then quickly reinstated after protests from politicians and the artists). Hage contributed photographs to the exhibit and semi-fictional travelogues to the catalogue. The curator took him by the hand and said: "You should write."
So he did. He published short stories in literary magazines, many of them set in Beirut, "because when you live through a war, that's bound to come out first." One of the stories refused to leave his head until he expanded it into a
novel.
That novel allowed him to give up his day job as a taxi driver and concentrate on writing instead. A discussion of the IMPAC prize money prompts a fervent outburst. "As an artist I lived for 20 years below the poverty line. If you take that money and split it on 20 years, it's peanuts! Everybody thinks I won the lottery."
He throws up his hands. "I worked hard for this, I sacrificed, I never got married, I never got kids. All for my art. I was a taxi driver, a dishwasher, so I can go and take photographs and exhibit them or write a few pages. This money I earned."
The heat of the minute passes and Hage leans back with a smile that says, yeah, I'm a passionate guy, what can I do? Pretty soon he'll be back in Montreal, where he recently finished work on his second novel, Cockroach a series of contemporary vignettes, he says, about mental illness and the clash of civilizations. "I can't wait till this book comes out," he says, "so I can prove to people I'm a writer, not just a witness."
Rawi Hage's Cockroach will be released on Aug. 30 by House of Anansi Press.