The Last of the Angels

Set in the northern Iraqi city of Kirkuk during the 1950s, Fadhil al-Azzawi's novel The Last of the Angels tells the slyly humorous tale of three strikingly different people in one small neighborhood. During a labor strike against the British-run Iraq Petroleum Company, Hameed Nylon becomes a labor organizer and later a revolutionary, like his hero, Mao Tse-Tung. His brother-in-law, the sheep butcher Khidir Musa, travels to the Soviet Union to find his long-lost brothers, and returns home to great acclaim (and personal fortune) in an airship. Meanwhile, a young boy named Burhan Abdullah discovers an old chest in the attic of his family's house that lets him talk to angels. By turns satiric, picaresque, and apocalyptic, The Last of the Angels evokes the colorful atmosphere of Kirkuk, with its mix of Turkmen, Kurds, Arabs, Jews, and Assyrian Christians.Painting a loving, panoramic, and elegiac portrait of the city in the final years of Iraq's monarchy, al-Azzawi narrates his novel with a wry humor worthy of Twain and a magical nuance akin to Garcia Marquez. From a family's cat that is revealed to be a jinn to a murdered barber who ends up hailed as a saint with his own shrine, The Last of the Angels skillfully blends the comic and the supernatural. But as the grim reality of modern Iraqi history catches up with the novel's events, we come to learn the depth and complexity of Hameed Nylon, Khidir Musa, and Burhan Abdullah, and al-Azzawi's comic novel becomes a moving tale of growing up in a dangerous world.