Frankenstein in Baghdad

This one surprised me by how easy it was to follow considering the number of characters, normally I can't for the life of me keep up with books that follow multiple characters and this one even scared me with a long list of characters at the beginning.

The juxtaposition of types of horrors, the bombings that are treated as routine, the degradation of the spaces where people live and of their connections and the more outright horror of the frankenstein (both of his existence and of his experience) make for a pretty uncomfortable and suffocating type of horror. There's also a vibrant charm about this book with characters that often come across as grandiosely peculiar in their own ways.

This book won at least two awards; the International Prize for Arabic Fiction and France's Grand Prize for Fantasy, and the author had previously been named one of the 39 best Arab authors under the age of 39. I picked it up to read for the Year of the Asian Reading Challenge, since the Middle East is all-too-often neglected in regional groupings like that. People don't think of it as Europe or Asia. I also try to read translated books on occasion, in an effort to diversify my reading. So this hit a number of my interests - I  wish I had actually liked the book more!

It's an interesting retelling of Frankenstein - which I haven't actually read, and now feel like I really should. But it bounces around between several viewpoints. It's not too many to keep straight, but it's definitely too many to truly care about. And it suffers from an unreliable narrator - it's written as several stories told to an author from multiple people that he's woven together into a single narrative, and while he does that well, it suffers from contradictions between how different characters recall things, scenes that don't play a part in furthering the plot but the characters thought they were important, and no authoritative “this is what REALLY happened” to draw it all together.

And I very much dislike unreliable narrators, so that alone is enough to make me dislike the book. If you like ambiguous narratives and vigilante stories, however, you might enjoy this, and the writing style itself was quite engrossing.

You can find all my reviews and more at Goddess in the Stacks.

This Frankenstein is not the product of mad science, nor does he serve as a condemnation of the hubris of mankind or our fear of the other. Here, composed of the body parts of bombing victims, he is an avatar of pure vengeance. And as he changes from hunting down the killers of his composite body parts to indiscriminately killing innocents to keep himself from decomposing, the allegory is far from subtle but it works.

But the creature is only part of this book, which is also a mosaic novel about the inhabitants of a Baghdad neighborhood during American occupation. Their stories are tangled up in a disjointed patchwork, very much like the creature's body. The standout story strand is that of an elderly woman, refusing to accept the long ago death of her son. But many of the other characters get short shrift. And the story that get the most attention, of a journalist who falls under the thrall of his shady publisher, unfortunately lacks any real interest and continually drags the book down.