Ahmed SaadawiReviews

Saadawi conjures a monster in this macabre comedy that requires human flesh to thrive - first from the underbelly of society, then from anybody in its path.
Hadi, a trash merchant, gathers human body parts and puts them together to construct a corpse in the desolate streets of US-occupied Baghdad. His stated objective is for the government to acknowledge the pieces as humans and provide them with proper burial. When the corpse goes missing, a wave of weird murders sweeps the city, and stories of a horrifying-looking criminal who, despite being shot, cannot be killed flood in.
Despite the dark elements to this concept, Saadawi handles with a light touch. He creates some fantastic characters and captures with white-knuckle horror and black humour the surreal reality of a city at war.

I included this excellent book in my Best Middle Eastern Books to read.
https://quizlit.org/10-best-middle-eastern-books

Interesting if never quite compelling, Frankenstein in Baghdad is a loose riff on the eponymous Gothic novel that unfolds in contemporary Baghdad. Here, Hadi the Junk Dealer starts to collect the parts of human bodies which litter the city, trying to create a whole body that can be properly laid to rest. But by chance, the soul of a young man killed in a bomb attack ends up animating the corpse—and the bulletproof Whatsitsname is soon bound on revenge. Ahmed Saadawai's novel has flashes of dark satirical humour, but mostly I found this a sombre read. The large cast of POV characters provides many different perspectives on what's happening—are the events we're reading about "actually" happening or are they a hallucination? a hoax?—but while I found some of them engaging, many of them were difficult to keep track of and generally fairly passive/reactive to what's going on around them. Which may be an understandable reaction to life in the kind of circumstances described here! But it made for a less propulsive read.

Unfortunately this book wasn't really for me. The detached third-person omniscient writing style drifts between numerous characters, none of whom are particularly appealing. All the characters mostly just sort of have things happen to them, and feel vaguely dissatisfied about it. Time also sort of drifts around, with events often being told out of order for no particular reason. And the main plot sort of wanders off, never to return to that POV again.

This should be a 3.75, but I don't want to give it a 3.5. So, it's different, it's interesting, but it's not compelling. I wavers between dream-like, parable and child-like, and the end, well is there an end? It just finishes really, with no real ending.

Saadawi's layering of the beginning makes for a slow dive into the traumatized city of Baghdad and its struggling inhabitants, but in a fashion that lures the reader deeper and deeper into what feels like the set-up for a realistic horror novel. When things go the way of Frankenstein, turning sideways into a puzzle of characters, bodies, and victimhood, the picture becomes both clearer and more labyrinthine. Paying homage to classics such as Frankenstein and Dracula also add further layers for the readers who've read the classics, and while this may be a slow horror read in comparison to other contemporary horror novels, I'm glad to have made my way through it.

Baghdad, a city torn apart by conflict, where car bombs sow death on a numbingly regular basis. Baghdad, a city where the balance between different cultures and faiths, delicate at the best of times, is jeopardised by covert lobbies and political pressure groups. Baghdad, a city whose sons and daughters are sacrificed – lost or dead in wars, or emigrants in foreign countries, lured by the promise of peace.

These daily horrors are transformed by Ahmed Saadawi into a contemporary Gothic novel, in which the violence which stalks the streets of Baghdad is personified in the figure of the monstrous “Whatsisname”. Pieced together by Hadi the Junk Dealer from body parts of car bomb victims, the Whatsisname is animated by the soul of Hasib Mohamed Jaafar, a hotel guard killed in a terrorist attack. The spark which joins body and soul is the constant prayer of old Elishva, who has not yet lost hope of the return of her son Daniel, lost decades before in the Iran-Iraq War. The “Whatsitsname” embarks on a mission of righteous revenge against criminals, only to become himself (itself?) drawn into a vicious cycle of violence.

Frankenstein in Baghdad won its author the International Prize for Arabic Fiction in 2014 and is now available in a brilliant English translation by Jonathan Wright. It was suggested to me by my Goodreads friend Alan as a work of “Iraqi Gothic”. And “Gothic” it certainly is. After all, it features a monster nicknamed by the Baghdadi newspapers as “Frankenstein”, it contains brief but stomach-churning passages of body horror and it recycles and adapts several tropes of the genre. The ruins of old are replaced by bombed-out buildings, the cemeteries substituted by the tragic scenes following the umpteenth terrorist attack. There is also more than a nod to the Gothic in the fragmented narrative and the recurring theme of mistaken identities. Thus, the book opens with a “Final Report” about the shadowy “Tracking and Pursuit Department” which casts doubt on the veracity of the whole story as presented to us. Part of the novel is a transcript of an interview recorded by the monster himself or, possibly, an impostor posing as him. Throughout, there is a sense that “nothing is but what is not”.

Yet, particularly in its initial chapters, what the novel reminded me of were not the classics of the Gothic but, rather, the works of Mikhail Bulgakov. In fact, as in Bulgakov, the fantastical elements often have a whimsical, surreal, fairy-tale tinge quite unlike traditional “supernatural” fiction – saints speak from icons, astrologers assist the army, the souls of the dead meet for chats. There is also a strong streak of dark humour and satire which sometimes had me laughing aloud. Admittedly, the novel becomes increasingly grim as it progresses and the final scene is poignant, bleak and very effective.

It was recently announced that the novel would be turned into a film. I certainly look forward to that. This unusual and striking novel certainly deserves to be well-known.

الرواية جميلة ولكنها لم ترقى الى مستوى توقعاتي.. حيث احسست بان هناك الكثير من التفاصيل السائبة والشخصيات محدودة التأثير اضافة الى مشكلة الحوار المتعثر بين الفصحى والعامية..
اعجبتني الملامح العراقية في الرواية واحسست اني اعود الى فروع البتاويين القديمة احيانا .. واعجبتني ايضا فكرة ادخال سعداوي لنفسه في الفصول الاخيرة من الرواية

In this International Booker Prize finalist we have a modern day Dr Frankenstein would makes a creature from the body parts of dead humans. He is trying to raise awareness for those who have been killed in the war in Baghdad, but when his project goes awry there is the beginnings of a modern day horror story. The blend of great story-telling and imagination make this a stellar book that leads you to new views of the nature of our times.½

يقول جورج اورويل في رائعته ١٩٨٤ " ان افضل الكتب تلك التي تخبرك بامور انت تعرفها ابتداءا "
رواية السعداوي إن طالعها قارئ بعيد عن الواقع العراقي قد لا تثير فيه الاعجاب. لقد عشنا هذه التفاصيل الدقيقة التي يذكرها الكاتب ببراعة في اسطر الكتاب حتى انني منبهر كيف استطاع ان يسرد هذا الكم من احداث الحرب الاهليه ويدونها كتابه.
ممتعه وحزينة ، واقعيه الى حد المأساويه ، من يظنها رواية خيالية فهو خاطئ بالتأكيد لكني اود ذكر مسألة " السعداوي من خلال ثنايا الروايه نسب تداعيات الوضع العراقي الى اللاعبين في الساحة ولم يشر الى دور القوى العالمية والاقليمية الكبير في تاجيج الصراع بطريقة مباشرة في بعض الحالات، ولكن حتى هذا الانتقاد يمكن ان يبرر تحت مسمى تحمل مسؤولية اخطائنا والاستفادة منها، كتب مثل هذه تعتبر وثيقة تاريخية للصراع الذي دار في العراق بلسان الناس.

First off, know that this is not a straight-up Frankenstein retelling. It's not sci-fi lite: rather, Saadawi took the idea of Frankenstein's creation, and pulls a ship of Theseus with it--which is highly fitting, as you'll see in my spoiler-y description.

Saadawi has a lot of characters on the board here, and the book includes a handy list of them at the front to help you keep track. I absolutely love books chock-full of memorable characters, and Saadawi definitely delivers.

Like Mary Shelley, Saadawi structures his story in layers. We begin with a top-secret notice about this book and the activities of a government organization known as the Pursuit and Tracking Division. Apparently the division should be disbanded, the story destroyed, and the author rearrested. We hear the story itself as assembled by the nameless author, who is building on the work of disgraced young journalist Mahmoud al-Sawadi, who heard the story from a charismatic junk dealer.

I'm about to write a description that will refresh my memory in the future; pieces of the story not learned until late in the book will be included. Quit while you're ahead if you don't want the story to be spoiled.


Junk dealer Hadi is dismayed to discover, while identifying the remains of a friend, that when a person is killed by a blast from a bomb, not every piece of every body is retrieved. He decides that in addition to junk for resale, he will gather abandoned pieces of people, assembling them into a single body that may be given a proper burial.

What he does not expect his that his next door neighbor, a very old Christian woman named Elishva, will see in the body the miracle that she has begged from Saint George for years: the return of her beloved son Daniel, who was disappeared years earlier. She calls to this creation just as the spirit of a man freshly killed in a suicide attack finds the soulless body, and between Hadi's work and her call, the creature comes to life. Okay, so he doesn't look much like Daniel, but Elishva knows better than to question a miracle.

But he does not stay to comfort the woman in her old age. Instead, he is compelled to enact revenge on those who murdered the people whose components make up his body. Garrulous Hadi shares his insider knowledge of the murderer striking the city seemingly at random, though of course it's too wild a tale for any visitors to the local coffee shop to believe...except for Mahmoud, who convinces Hadi to take a recorder to Daniel so that he can tell his own story.

And what a story! Unlike Shelley's creation, Daniel has accumulated followers and factions, who see him as the ultimate Iraqi, a herald of a savior, and a savior himself. He also has a serious problem: if he kills someone or takes too long to do so, the part of his body associated with that victim starts to decay, and requires replacement. As he and his advisors try to decide how to handle this revelation, he begins to question just what makes someone a victim or a perpetrator in the first place.

The title of Mahmoud's expose based on Daniel's confessions gives its name to the title of the book. The article attracts the attention of the shady Pursuit and Tracking Division, which employs seers to identify threats both real and supernatural so that the government can thwart them or use them. The head of the division sees the capture of Daniel as his ticket to a cushier job, but his seers have very different opinions of what they should do when they locate the murderer.

Quite outside of Daniel's influence, several characters find their established ways of living coming apart at the seams. We come full circle back to the nameless author mentioned in the opening report, who takes over the story that Mahmoud abandons, only to come to the attention of the Pursuit and Tracking Division.


If that sounds like a lot, it is. The sprawling, diverse cast of characters includes Algerian immigrants, an Armenian family, country folks drawn to the city for opportunity, and city folks driven to the countryside and out of the country altogether for fear of their physical and political safety. Shady real estate dealers and suave editors rub elbows with good-hearted coffee shop owners, failing hoteliers, and exhausted priests; Christian families live in formerly Jewish mansions while old Baghdad families support and envy each other in turns; American forces barrel through the neighborhood with impunity; and independent female artists get lost in this male-dominated story. It's quite a collection, displaying a cross-section of a rich city slowly being destroyed by bombs, gangs, meddling foreigners, revenge, and greed.

What a book! I feel bad that it was probably only my emotional state at the time I read this that kept me from enjoying it fully. It's hard to convey more than the plot, because a major strength of this book was Saadawi's ability to build small scenes that help build human characters with unrealized emotional depth (as when a real estate broker full of confidence and bluster becomes a terrified shadow of himself in the face of unpredictable American soldiers) or make you realize that even a journalist main character isn't as reliable as you thought (as when Mahmoud finally meets the woman he's been fantasizing about for months and swings, on no evidence, from seeing her as a whore to an ideal to a slut to a victim of unwanted attention to an opportunist to an object of his own unwanted attention). There's a lot to the plot, but it's these small scenes and their fascinating characters, and the universal humanity of big questions in what may appear to be simple situations, that make Frankenstein in Baghdad a standout.

Quotes

(I had a ton, but I winnowed them down. I'm not totally sure why I settled on only these two:

p. 60) Elishva promises God that if something bad happens to the man who betrayed her son, she will (do something special that I forgot because I'm reviewing this book after reading two others) in his honor.
Having adopted many of the customs of the neighborhood, Elishva saw it as a vow she was now fulfilling, although Father Josiah always corrected her.
"We don't set conditions for the Lord, as Muslims do," he would say. "We don't say, 'If You do this, then I'll do that."
Elishva knew what he meant, of course, but she saw no harm in setting conditions for God, as Umm Salim and her other Muslim neighbors did. She didn't see the Lord in quite the same way as Father Josiah did. The Lord wasn't "in the highest"; she didn't see him as domineering or tyrannical. He was just an old friend, and it would be hard to abandon that friendship.

p. 123) A debate occurs on a talk show about who is responsible for instigating a mass panic and subsequent deaths in Baghdad.
"Honestly, I think everyone was responsible in one way or another. I'd go further and say that all the security incidents and the tragedies we're seeing stem from one thing--fear. The people on the bridge died because they were frightened of dying. Every day we're dying from the same fear of dying. The groups that have given shelter and support to al-Qaeda have done so because they are frightened of another group, and this other group has created and mobilized militias to protect itself from al-Qaeda. It has created a death machine working in the other direction because it's afraid of the Other. And we're going to see more and more death because of fear. The government and the occupation forces have to eliminate fear. They must put a stop to it if they really want this cycle of killing to end."

Baghdad, a city torn apart by conflict, where car bombs sow death on a numbingly regular basis. Baghdad, a city where the balance between different cultures and faiths, delicate at the best of times, is jeopardised by covert lobbies and political pressure groups. Baghdad, a city whose sons and daughters are sacrificed – lost or dead in wars, or emigrants in foreign countries, lured by the promise of peace.

These daily horrors are transformed by Ahmed Saadawi into a contemporary Gothic novel, in which the violence which stalks the streets of Baghdad is personified in the figure of the monstrous “Whatsisname”. Pieced together by Hadi the Junk Dealer from body parts of car bomb victims, the Whatsisname is animated by the soul of Hasib Mohamed Jaafar, a hotel guard killed in a terrorist attack. The spark which joins body and soul is the constant prayer of old Elishva, who has not yet lost hope of the return of her son Daniel, lost decades before in the Iran-Iraq War. The “Whatsitsname” embarks on a mission of righteous revenge against criminals, only to become himself (itself?) drawn into a vicious cycle of violence.

Frankenstein in Baghdad won its author the International Prize for Arabic Fiction in 2014 and is now available in a brilliant English translation by Jonathan Wright. It was suggested to me by my Goodreads friend Alan as a work of “Iraqi Gothic”. And “Gothic” it certainly is. After all, it features a monster nicknamed by the Baghdadi newspapers as “Frankenstein”, it contains brief but stomach-churning passages of body horror and it recycles and adapts several tropes of the genre. The ruins of old are replaced by bombed-out buildings, the cemeteries substituted by the tragic scenes following the umpteenth terrorist attack. There is also more than a nod to the Gothic in the fragmented narrative and the recurring theme of mistaken identities. Thus, the book opens with a “Final Report” about the shadowy “Tracking and Pursuit Department” which casts doubt on the veracity of the whole story as presented to us. Part of the novel is a transcript of an interview recorded by the monster himself or, possibly, an impostor posing as him. Throughout, there is a sense that “nothing is but what is not”.

Yet, particularly in its initial chapters, what the novel reminded me of were not the classics of the Gothic but, rather, the works of Mikhail Bulgakov. In fact, as in Bulgakov, the fantastical elements often have a whimsical, surreal, fairy-tale tinge quite unlike traditional “supernatural” fiction – saints speak from icons, astrologers assist the army, the souls of the dead meet for chats. There is also a strong streak of dark humour and satire which sometimes had me laughing aloud. Admittedly, the novel becomes increasingly grim as it progresses and the final scene is poignant, bleak and very effective.

It was recently announced that the novel would be turned into a film. I certainly look forward to that. This unusual and striking novel certainly deserves to be well-known.

Not as good as the original Frankenstein, but still pretty good.

The central idea, of a monster stitched from body-parts found on the streets, given life by a soul whose original body was smithereened, and struggling with a revenge mission that turns out to be self-consuming, is great. And I like Saadawi's patchwork narrative style, too, events unfolding lurchingly, sometimes back to front. Not so keen on the stuff with the Tracking & Pursuit bureau and its staff of magicians and astrologers. The magic of the monster would have been stronger without those distractions.½

Hadi is a Junk Dealer in US-occupied Baghdad in early 2000s (we get a dateline from the first chapter but I will get to it in a bit). His job is to buy (or find) things people do not want and sell them to people who do. And while he deals with people's junk, he realizes that human parts are treated as trash - the violence of the street often ends up with human parts all over the place and these are just swept with the rest of the trash. So he decides to start collecting them, making complete people out of it and then selling (or giving away) the resulting complete corpse to the hospitals - so they can be properly buried.

He lives in part of the city where you can see everything that the country has to offer - the madwoman Elishva, a Christian widow who lost her son in one of the wars earlier, a coffee shop on the corner, a hotel owner, trying and failing to keep his business afloat, a real estate dealer who seems to be the only one who actually is doing well (how honestly he does that is a different story). But because he is always on the road (his business requires it), he manages to be everywhere else - including close to the US embassy. Add to that a young journalist with his own dark history and his boss (who seems to have his own agenda) and the very driven lead of the Tracking and Pursuit Department. Which brings us back to the beginning of the novel and how the whole book is presented - it starts with a final secret report which orders for the author and the book to be essentially disappeared.

With this opening and the cast of characters, the book would have had enough going. But then there is Whatitsname. Remember the body parts that Hadi was collecting? By some chance, at the moment when the body is complete, a young man dies and his soul ends up in the new body. And Whatitsname is born - and he needs to avenge the death of everyone who had become a part of him. Except that dead parts don't survive long so he needs to repair himself, adding more parts... adding more revenge. And the department responsible for tracking him is the Tracking and Pursuit Department - the guys who deal with the unusual.

The realism of the story of Baghdad at the time merges with the Whatitsname's story to give the whole novel a Gothic feeling with an Eastern flavor. There are two different stories - one rooted into reality and that could have been and one in the speculative realm which if you squint can be dismissed as hallucinations I guess (leaving this as a realistic novel and finding a way to make the fantastical elements as metaphors) but that will be a disservice to the novel. It weaves the two together on purpose and makes them a whole without throwing the story out from reality. And somewhere in there, while Whatitsname starts finding his own humanity, other characters lose theirs (or show that they never had it). At some points Whatitsname is the most humane of all characters in a chapter and that gives you a pause. The title is not random - and not just on the surface.

The story was never going to be a happy one - there are way too many broken people and the constant violence in Iraq does not help much. That beginning already tells you that the powers that be will manage to suppress the knowledge of Whatitsname. But we still get to see the collapsed society and the wounded pride of an old city.

How much one wants to read that as an allegory is up to the reader. It is easy to find parallels if you want to - and even if you do not, the story makes you stop and think more often than not. It has a Scheherazade's quality to it, even in the story of Whatitsname - the same way how she always needs to keep telling stories to live, Whatitsname needs to keep revenging and adding new pieces so he can live. Strip that story and you still have a portrait of a city and its people - at a time where being good is almost dangerous and trust will cause you issues.

It is not an easy novel and it can be disorienting in places - it can feel like it is going on and on in places where you want it to speed and then it speeds through a part where you want it to linger. And yet, I dare you to not finish it (if you do not leave it after the first pages - the style can take somewhat of a getting used to and the initial chapters are almost mundane). Enjoying it is probably not the word I would use for it - the novel is bleak and foreboding. But I would recommend it to anyone who reads cross-genres - I suspect that it won't work very well for people that read only speculative fiction or just realistic one - the mix of them is what makes the novel and what makes it stay in your mind of a long time after you finish it.½

I enjoyed this novel, but I suspect there's much more to it than I can grasp as someone very unfamiliar with Iraq beyond headlines and basic history. There's a sense of inevitability, chaos, violence, and this feeling of a "true" Baghdad buried under the surface---in some ways literally---an ancient city of peace, prosperity, and grandeur, and a modern one of little boys in soccer leagues.

I received a ARC from Edelweiss, and did not like this book at all. I found it unreadable. The title is the best thing about it.

الفكرة جيدة ولكن تنفيذها سيئ. تكرر فيها أخطاء لغوية يصعب تجاهلها، لا سيما وأن أحداثها في بغداد

I loved everything about this novel except for the storytelling, which was a bit plodding and which frequently made me want to look away from the page and daydream. That's a shame because I think the work it takes to read this story probably is a high enough bar to prevent the novel from reaching the audience it deserves.

The story itself is wonderful. I feel very close to the characters. Here is a lovingly portrayed community in Baghdad at a time when suicide bombers are regularly blowing themselves and others up in residential neighborhoods. The people who survive go about their business. The portrayal here of the ways ordinary life goes on reflects a kind of fatalistic unreality that I imagine is something close to how people cope in real war zones. The core metaphor is brilliant: The animated, ensouled corpse that is the titular character of the novel perfectly captures the absurdity of war, and his actions perfectly capture the futility of ever trying to "win" a war, and the impossibility of ever reaching an outcome where all deaths are avenged, all evil eradicated, and all good restored.

I recommend this novel without reservation for those who don't mind being bored now and then on their way to revelation.

It was easy growing up to not think too hard about the Iraq war--it was happening far away and didn't directly impact anyone I knew. Even when I did think about it, it was simpler to think in broad terms, in body counts and years. Inhabiting fictional characters during the occupation made it seem a lot less abstract, and (at least for a few hundred pages) got me to really reflect on the individual experience.

Don't get me wrong, the actual story is great too--funny and touching and so rich in detail I can smell the tea and tobacco in the hotel lobby. But I mainly see that as a tempting capsule for medicine I didn't know I needed.

this is way less interesting that whatever you imagined whenever you heard about its cool concept

I liked this book as a portrait of a Baghdad neighborhood - how a wide assortment of ordinary people try to live normal lives as their homes and businesses collapse piecemeal around them. I liked having a large cast of characters, from comic clowns to earnest journalists, to the Frankenstein (aka "Whatsitsname") who ponders the meaning of good and evil in the human heart, as he goes about fulfilling his role as an avenging angel. But like Whatsitsname, the individual parts of this book don't hang together - it feels a bit motley. Also, with the exception of Elvisha, the women were all cardboard cut outs, just there to fulfill a role rather than be a person. Still, this is an important book for providing a satirical window into the ordinary, daily hell unleashed in Iraq by a shamefully, inexcusably ignorant American administration.

If you've been wondering where are the novels and stories about the Iraqi experience of the 2003 invasion and its aftermath, this novel is the place to begin. Ahmed Saadawi depicts a city of half-ruined buildings, families broken by war and neighborhoods shaken by explosions. Drifting through the city are American soldiers and police, never center stage but somehow central to life in Baghdad. The Iraqi Frankenstein embodies violence: the creature initially kills people who have committed injustices, who are guilty, but gradually becomes an opportunistic killer. The police and the Americans pursue but never capture this Frankenstein, who becomes part of the violence which pervades the city. I have been haunted by the book since reading it.

This is a fantastic book. One of the best for me in 2018. I could not stop reading it. It is also my first book from an Iraqi author.

Finished Ahmed Saadawi's "Frankenstein in Baghdad." It’s worth contrasting with Shelley's Frankenstein. Shelley writes about Frankenstein's misuse of Science, i.e., galvanism, in creating an ultimately vengeful Creature, existing primarily in a Romantic world of wild nature, the background of which is the setting for the novel. Saadawi's Frankenstein in Baghdad, OTOH, is set in an urban hell of murders, car bombings, massacres and various varieties of sectarian warfare. His Frankenstein is a monster created from the parts of bomb victims, born out of religion and magic, caught up in a world of brutality and suffering.
There's been a minor debate about the quality of this book. With respect to those who did not like it, I think it works quite well, with clearly delineated characters and a fascinating narrative structure that at times almost turns in on itself, but not quite like the Arabian Nights.
I never doubted that it was a good idea. I just think it was terribly executed. Somehow Saadawi has written a book about war, monsters, car bombs etc and made it boring. It should have been rip-roaring but he gets far too hung up on making satirical points and forgets that it's supposed to be entertainment as well.
In the early part of the book I thought I detected a Hemingwayesque style but that faded out. I was most entranced about the depiction of Baghdad and thought it was more a portrayal of a city under pressure, I did feel about the last quarter of the book dragged a bit, but thought that might have bebn me, because by that time I was looking forward to Greene's “Ministry of Fear.”

I was going to continue reading some more Gothic novels, but over the years I've lost the taste for them. Am going to read some Graham Greene instead.

Just finished this up, and I’m glad I read it. It is a clever book using the concept of the Frankenstein monster to illustrate a never-ending cycle of revenge. Another theme in the book I liked was the idea of multiple types of justice being meted out for everyone - kind of like karma. I would have liked to see more of the monster in the book and was a little let down by the ending, but overall it was an interesting read.

There's a lot going on in Ahmed Saadawi's novel. There's Hadi, the old junk dealer whose friend is killed in one of the never-ending car bomb explosions. There's the elderly Christian woman, who ignores her daughters' pleas to come join them in Australia because she's still waiting for her son, who went missing in the Iran-Iraq war, to come home. There's a young journalist, working hard to write stories in a hostile environment and dragged along whenever his boss goes to network with important people. There's the head of a government department filled with magicians and fortune tellers, hoping to move on to bigger things. And there's the whatsitsname, cobbled together from the body parts left behind after various explosions, reanimated and looking to find out why he's alive.

Baghdad in the early days of American occupation is a dangerous and complex place and as each person negotiates the dangers, they are all affected by the presence of the unnamed monster in their midst.

I was surprised at how much I was drawn into Saadawi's story. It's complex, and I won't even pretend to understand the tensions between the different factions and groups. But running behind the complex plot involving a number of people, all with different goals and mindsets, is a deep compassion for each and every character in the novel. Saadawi writes with equal heart, whether his focus is on an elderly woman or a young man, and even his murderous monster. I'm glad this was shortlisted for the Man Booker International Prize and I hope it reaches many readers as it deserves to be widely read.