Frankenstein in Baghdad by Ahmed Saadawi
Requirements: .ePUB, .mobi, .azw3 reader, 1.5mb
Overview: "Frankenstein in Baghdad is set in the aftermath of the US invasion of Iraq. Baghdad seems somehow both ordinary and extraordinary: it is a city where journalists and government officials might meet at the Novotel and deplore the state of things, and where one must decide whether bus or taxi offers the quickest route to the office at rush hour; but it is also a city in which men take canvas sacks to the sites of explosions and collect the detritus of passers-by blown into bits."
Hadi, a disreputable old junk-dealer, finds a nose on the street and takes it home to his shed. There, among the bits of furniture and broken kitchen units that are his trade, lies “the body of a naked man, with viscous liquids, light in colour, oozing from parts of it”. This was a nameless victim of sectarian violence, retrieved from the Baghdad streets by Hadi, who cannot countenance the idea of hasty burials of corpses that are incomplete. The body’s face is a ruin: “Where the nose should have been [it] was badly disfigured, as if a wild animal had bitten a chunk out of it.” Hadi carefully stitches a new nose in place, and later – telling the tale to his friends, who receive it quite placidly, as another of the old man’s shaggy dog stories – says: “I made it complete so it wouldn’t be treated as rubbish, so it would be respected like other dead people and given a proper burial.” He calls it Whatsitsname."
What ensues is an acute portrait of Middle Eastern sectarianism and geopolitical ineptitude, an absurdist morality fable, and a horror fantasy. Whatsitsname, possessed with righteous fury, sets about killing those who have had a hand in making Baghdad a slaughterhouse. The authorities are concerned: who could have been responsible for leaving four men dead on a street corner, each having seemingly strangled the other? A large cast is sucked into Whatsitsname’s ambit: old Elishva, who has never recovered from the death of her son, and welcomes Whatsitsname into her home in his stead; Faraj the estate agent, who has an eye on Elishva’s property; Mahmoud al-Sawadhi, an ambitious journalist; and various military officials, cafe proprietors, sex workers and neighbours. As his body begins to disintegrate, Whatsitsname makes repeat visits to Hadi’s shed, requiring an arm here, or a section of cheek there; in time he acquires acolytes willing to sacrifice themselves so that he might have, for instance, a new pair of hands with which to murder."
Genre: Fiction > Sci-Fi/Fantasy
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