Just Finished Reading: Frankenstein in Baghdad by Ahmed Saadawi (FP: 2013) [272pp] 

Sometimes he didn’t know why he did it. It was easy to blame the alcohol in his system, but that wasn’t the real reason, and he knew it. It was part protest against the uncaring authorities and part homage to the dead – at least that’s what he told himself to justify the grisly tasks. The product of those tasks, the recovery of unclaimed body parts from the explosions across the city, was laying in nearby room almost ‘complete’. It was, he thought, almost ready to deliver as a rebuke to the new regime and their American backers. Then, almost as if it had never existed, the body, the patchwork corpse, vanished one stormy night. Had someone claimed it? Had it been stolen by someone for some purpose? Clearly the authorities hadn’t taken it, or he’d be in prison or worse. So where was it? It wasn’t long before he and his neighbours started hearing the rumours – of dead agents of the previous regime, of fruitless police chases and a man that bullets couldn’t kill. He dismissed the idea that it involved him or his ‘project’. Things like that didn’t happen in the modern world, right.....? 

I’d been hearing about this for a while – mostly on BookTube – so when I saw it in my fave Indie bookstore, I snapped it up. It certainly lived up to its hype and I really liked it. It’s a strange tale though! I don’t think that you needed to have read Shelly’s original, but I think knowing that story fairly well enhanced my enjoyment as I saw parallels and concordances with the 1818 classic. The writing/translation was excellent with a sprinkle of horror/fantasy and magical realism salted through a tale of down-on-the-streets survival in an ultra-violent city balanced on the edge of chaos and destruction. The ‘monster’ - a fascinating construct/character in its own right – was obviously a metaphor for the violence and seemingly endless cycle of revenge killings going on in Baghdad after the events of Gulf War II, but the author didn’t constantly hit you over the head with that obvious fact. The writing was a LOT more subtle than that. One of the, many, things I loved about the book was the number of fully fleshed out characters involved in the events as they evolved – from the ‘creature’ builder himself to the lonely grandmother awaiting the return of her son from the long-ago Iraq/Iran War, to the opportunist real-estate man trying to make a FAST buck and the reporter misled by his boss and harassed by the authorities and finally the military man trying to make a name for himself in a wild-west environment aided by his fractious team of astrologers. It was quite a ride!  

If you want to read something very much out of the ordinary that’s both well written and thought provoking, then this is definitely the book for you. I’m not in the least surprised that it was nominated for literary prizes and won some too. A little violent at times and a little gory at others – but probably not much more that Mary Shelly’s version – this is a highly recommended read that will stay with you long after the distant sound of car bombs have faded. 

Translated from the Arabic by Jonathan Wright.