SHORTLISTED FOR THE MAN BOOKER INTERNATIONAL PRIZE 2018
WINNER OF THE INTERNATIONAL PRIZE FOR ARABIC FICTION
‘Extraordinary… A devastating but essential read.’ Kevin Powers, bestselling author and National Book Award finalist for The Yellow Birds
‘Gripping, darkly humorous…profound.’ Phil Klay, bestselling author and National Book Award winner for Redeployment
From the rubble-strewn streets of US-occupied Baghdad, the scavenger Hadi collects human body parts and stitches them together to create a corpse. His goal, he claims, is for the government to recognize the parts as people and give them a proper burial. But when the corpse goes missing, a wave of eerie murders sweeps the city, and reports stream in of a horrendous-looking criminal who, though shot, cannot be killed.
Hadi soon realises he has created a monster, one that needs human flesh to survive – first from the guilty, and then from anyone who crosses its path. An extraordinary achievement, Frankenstein in Baghdad captures with white-knuckle horror and black humour the surreal reality of a city at war.
Review
By Becky Hinshelwood
This book is a revelation. Impeccably and tightly written, it weaves the darkest of humour and keen satire with everyday community episodes in a way that makes it one of a kind. Reading this, you will experience shock, fear, confusion, pity, amusement, curiosity and sadness – sometimes all at the same time. It is a soap opera spliced with horror and will leave you contemplating war, society and justice long after you close the pages.
We are in Baghdad in 2005. Over the course of this year and against the backdrop of Saddam Hussein’s trial for crimes against humanity (notably this is never mentioned), the city is to experience repeated suicide bombings and massive destabilisation. The thread of the plot is centred on Hadi, the junk dealer and prolific spinner of yarns who, after he experiences the loss of a friend to a bomb, begins to collect body parts and stitch them together. He’s unsure about his own motivations but forms a vague plan to use the corpse as a protest.
Circumstance intervenes to embed the corpse with a restless spirit who begins a campaign of vengeance which evolves into one of survival resulting in a series of murders more gruesome and terrifying than even the daily threat of bombing. Is this justice correct? Was any action in the name of justice in Iraq correct? Is it today?
To understand the impact of the murders, we need to understand the community. This is something that readers and viewers in the west typically struggle to do. Surveying events via the BBC, all we see is another bombing, another incomprehensible loss of life. So it was in the mid 00’s with Iraq and not much has changed for many news reports of events in Syria to this day.
Ahmed Saadawi has created a community in the Baghdad neighbourhood of Bataween that is so complex, warm and real that its normality plays a huge part in establishing a sense of shock. Gruesome events and ghastly actions are set against the normality of the gossipy coffee house, office politics, family tensions, unrequited lust. The cast is considerable, so that the character list at the start of the book proves extremely helpful.
Elishva is elderly, almost blind and living with decades of grief. She is an Assyrian Christian who holds real or imagined conversations with Saint George the Martyr. Aziz is an Egyptian who runs the coffee shop that is host to much of the storytelling. Mahmoud is an aspirational journalist who frets over his heritage, worrying that his family “were not real Arabs”. Faraj the estate agent and Abu Anmar the hotel owner are both interlopers engaged in a battle of business, with the former on the up and the latter rapidly declining.
This is a diverse community of very personal characters who I found appealing for better or for worse, with dynamics that are not dissimilar to any village across the globe. Their circumstances convene to make the existence of the Whatsitsname possible, even for it to thrive. The Whatsitsname itself is physically formed of all ethnicities, all faiths, criminal and innocent, strong and weak. It is a representation of the diversity of society, the conflicts within each one of us.
This make up of the Whatsitsname makes it something other than a monster. Despite its crimes, it becomes an everyman. In a tone of writing that reminded me of Crime and Punishment (but funnier), it is driven by a sense of self preservation. Aren’t we all, but at what cost?
Of course, no commentary on events in Iraq would be complete without a nod to corruption; within the media, government, armed forces and community at large. It’s everywhere. As the Whatsitsname discovers, no one is innocent. Metaphor is strong in this story, and Saadawi succeeds in achieving poignancy without becoming overly righteous. What is great about this book is that despite its horror, it remains completely, utterly and possibly ironically, human.
If Becky’s review has inspired you to read more, then you can buy your copy HERE + free UK delivery. Published by Oneworld