Ahmed Saadawi

The residents of Baghdad, who are involved in this novel, are thoroughly etched out in their own individual chapters and they lay out the framework for the novel. Firstly, the reader meets Elishva. She awaits the return of her son, Daniel, who unwillingly left for battle 20 years ago. Saint George the Martyr, a painting on her wall and with whom she converses daily, tells her he will return. She somehow has a knack for always skirting danger.
Her neighbor, Hadi, is a junk collector known for show more the stories he tells in the local coffee shop and which no one believes to be true. While he's scouring Baghdad for junk he comes across the bits of body parts left from the numerous explosions that have rocked the area. He stitches the pieces together, he "made it complete so it wouldn't be treated like trash, so it would be respected like other dead people and given a proper burial".
The third most important character of this novel is Hasib, a security guard working at the Sadeer Novotel hotel. He unwittingly becomes entangled with Hadi's good intentions.
The ending seemed a little weak but makes sense and it's implications are a bit scary.
This is an exquisitely written novel about revenge and the escalation of violence that involves everyone without discrimination, where lines are blurred until all focus is lost. It sheds light on the insanity that has pervaded Baghdad for decades. There is so much in this book that is thought provoking, so much to ponder and question. This is a novel which can and should be read and discussed for years to come. show less

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 show more 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. show less

This was a really powerful read, set in Baghdad during the American occupation. A second hand trader and storyteller can't cope with the loss of his friend and makes a monster from the remnants of victims of bombs. Brought to life by the combination of a mother's love and magicians working for the government (!), Saadawi uses the monster to tell stories about uncontrollable violence, colonialism and extremism. In a small neighbourhood with Christian, Jewish as well as Muslim histories, the show more collapse of the city is shown in terms of personal consequences, from the daughters phoning their elderly mother every Sunday to beg her to leave, to the estate agent "persuading" emigrants to expand his property empire. Alongside this is rumour, increasingly crazy but as the death toll rises, increasingly difficult to discount: including a monster who is stalking the streets, committing unknowable, escalating acts of violence with no apparent purpose. show less

Stunning, again. First, this is such a fresh, inventive premise, and the author pulls it off - it's not tacked on to the story, nor does it limit the story-telling. Second, as a narrative it's dynamic, there's action and events to create a good flow, the kind where you suddenly realize you've been reading for hours. And third, there is real depth here, thematically and ethically. Beautiful portraits of a city and neighborhood, individuals, and great questions of what ongoing violence can do show more to the soul of all three. show less