Lebanese author Rawi Hage has won the 100,000 euro ($165,000) International Dublin Literary Award, the world's richest prize for a work of fiction. Canadian-based Hage scooped the award for his book De Niro's Game, about best friends from childhood who have grown to adulthood in war-torn Beirut. His book describes the agonising choice they must make between staying in the city and consolidating power through crime; or going into exile abroad, alienated from the only existence they have known.

The judges described it as "an eloquent, forthright and at times beautifully written" first novel. "Ringing with insight and authenticity the novel shows how war can envelop lives - how one doesn't have much choice in such circumstances," said a statement from the judging panel, who chose it from a shortlist of eight books.

"It's a game where there are no winners, just degrees of survival. His unflinching gaze pours the blood-red sands of our moral dilemmas over every page. It's a wonderful debut and a deserving winner."Hage was born in Beirut and lived through nine years of civil war before emigrating to Canada. "I am a fortunate man," he said after he was presented with the award by Dublin's Lord Mayor Paddy Bourke.

"After a long journey of war, displacement and separation, I feel that I am one of the few wanderers who is privileged enough to have been rewarded, and for that I am very grateful."

The only literary award which pays more than the Dublin Literary Award is the Nobel Prize, which rewards a body of work rather than a single book.

The award is unique in that the 137 books originally nominated for the prize were chosen by 162 public libraries in 45 countries.

First awarded in 1996, the prize was established to underline the Irish capital's stature as a literary centre.

- AFP

It's one of the great paradoxes of the modern world that, while young Arabs blame the U.S.A. or other imperialist nations for their problems, they simultaneously find themselves adopting the fashions and imagery of the Hollywood dream machine, or European culture, for their idea of what's cool. It's as though their minds have already been colonized in advance.

This dilemma is one of the central features of Rawi Hage's debut novel, De Niro's Game, which this week won the world's richest literary prize, the IMPAC Dublin Literary Award, worth 100,000 euros or about $158,000 Canadian. The book had previously been nominated for both a Giller and a Governor General's Literary Award.

The IMPAC judges called it "an eloquent, forthright and at times beautifully written first novel. Ringing with insight and authenticity, the novel shows how war can envelop lives. It's a game where there are no winners, just degrees of survival."

Hage was born in Lebanon, lived through nine years of that country's civil war, and immigrated to Canada in 1992. His novel concerns two young men, Bassam and George, who have grown to adulthood in war-torn Beirut. Raised Catholic, they are young, poor and want all the trappings of western success: women, money, good clothes, nice cars and leisure. Since their country is at war and these things are scarce, they turn to crime.

George works in a casino run by the Christian militia, and is drawn into a scam to defraud money from the house. The two childhood friends begin to drift apart. George leans toward joining the militia. Bassam, from whose point of view the story is told, just wants to get enough stashed away to flee the country. Quiet and prone to flights of fantasy, he dreams of Rome.

Like many young men, their idea of crime is formed by a Hollywood sensibility. George calls himself De Niro, like the famed U.S. actor; another militiamen, whose specialty is torture, is called Rambo. (Technically, the novel might better have been called Walken's Game since the scenes of Russian roulette, which feature in the book, are inspired by the 1978 movie The Deer Hunter and were originally taken up by Christopher Walken's character, rather than DeNiro's. But De Niro's Game sounds cooler and has the added cachet of the actor's having played an array of gangsters in other movies.)

Both George and Bassam seem predestined to fates dictated before their birth by their parents, their religion and by politics. Bassam frequently compares what's happening to him with the Muslims on the other side of Beirut. Neither side seems to have any control over what's happening and, to Bassam, it seems a world governed only by madness and bombs. His rebellion is to look out only for himself -- the classic rebel with a gun.

The rebel with a gun theme is a staple of the American gangster film and of film noir which, in turn, has features of existentialism. One of the classic works of existentialism is The Stranger by Albert Camus, a book which Bassam reads later in the novel. In the Camus classic, a French protagonist kills an Arab on a beach. In Hage's novel, Bassam, the young Arab, kills other Arabs and fantasizes about killing a Frenchman. It could be argued that, once again, Bassam's imagination has been colonized by the French, another imperialist power in the Arab world.

Young Lebanese are moulded by war and Hollywood bad-boy images in Canadian author's prizewinning novel

Both characters are moulded by these outside forces. George, half-French to begin with, replaces his religious background with his idea of gangsters, which is later replaced, when he joins the militia, with ideas formed by The Deer Hunter. Bassam journeys through gangsterism to existentialism. Even when he eventually escapes to Paris, his vision of that city is distorted by his idea of the French Revolution, generated by his not-so-thorough education. No one sees anything clearly. Their dreams are coloured by their prejudices, imposed ideas and by the Hollywood dream factory.

The only feature of film noir not represented in the book is the predatory femme fatale. Bassam seems to be in search of such a character, but the girls he meets are nice and help him in one way or another. He's the predatory one.

This novel is a dark story that could have been called Existential Beirut Noir.

Hage excels in descriptions which are rich, almost stream-of-consciousness in feel. Consider this passage from the powerful section describing the slaughter of a pack of wild dogs, who formerly belonged to the rich residents of Beirut, now fled to Europe:

"An Afghani hound bitch was executed for treason, while in Paris her beloved owner was on all fours on a silk bedsheet, backing up her secret lover, Pierre, a French painter, in his artistic endeavours. A cocker spaniel was pursued by a fat fighter, while his mommy was buying filet mignon in the Champs Elys