Wendell Steavenson

Steavenson's time spent with the family of Iraqi General Kamel Sachet really shows the progression in the life of the country from the early optimism of Saddam's rule to the abuses that followed and the ambivalent complicity of those Baathies in high places. Sachet is shown to be a moral man whose guilt over the role he played in the regime is pushed to the breaking point. The irony is that his sons became involved in the anti-American insurgency - perhaps a twisted attempt to continue their show more father's tradition of military courage. show less

PARIS METRO reads like a fictionalized memoir. It follows an accomplished foreign correspondent covering the conflict in the Middle East, a role Steavenson herself has played through much of her career. A key success of the novel is her ability to conger from her professional experience a strong sense of what that life is actually like. There is constant motion in search of stories with little grounding other than to colleagues and editors. She depicts those colleagues as committed and show more cosmopolitan professionals with strong—often cynical—worldviews. Success requires cleverness, luck, connections and especially acceptance of the potential for danger. This lifestyle seems to provide little room for a settled family life in the usual sense. Indeed Steavenson gives us a first person fictional narrative with a deeply conflicted protagonist whose personal life is anything but usual. Instead it seems dark and unsatisfying with few unshakeable core values.

The dichotomies between the professional and personal are apparent everywhere. The narrative depicts sectarian conflicts that lead to lawlessness and violence with few easy answers. Her profession leaves Catherine ("Kit") Kittredge with feelings of “contempt, black humor, (and) cynicism.” She reports on insurgents, fundamentalists, soldiers, and politicians but the most intriguing character in the book seems to be her husband, Ahmed. He is an Iraqi whose father was executed by Saddam. He had a son by a previous wife whom he never divorced before marrying Kit, but expects her to embrace. She does. Steavenson depicts Ahmad as a cipher, not unlike the Middle East in general. He may be a diplomat or a terrorist; he may be a fundamentalist or an atheist; he clearly is adept at prevarication and compartmentalization. He frequently expresses a pragmatic view of the conflict that reveals a person who seems ill suited to support Kit in her struggle with self-doubt. Ahmed tells her things like: “Don’t be fooled by crowds. Crowds are easy to buy,” and “Humanity is a luxury; you need prosperity to have humanity.”

The plot follows Kit from the American invasion of Iraq in 2003 to the terrorist attacks on Charlie Hebdo and the Bataclan in Paris in 2015. Along the way she reports on the dissolution of Baghdad, the Arab Spring in Lebanon and Syria, and the refugee crisis on the Greek island of Kos. With a deft internal monologue and conversations with minor characters (Zorro the addicted photojournalist, Rousse the ill-fated illustrator, Alexandre and Jean her “godfathers”, and Little Ahmed her stepson) we witness the shaking of Kit’s core beliefs. Throughout, Steavenson is never tempted to offer easy solutions for either Kit or the Middle East.

Despite its considerable strength, PARIS METRO is not without flaws. The key one seems to derive from the very nature of a reporter’s job—to be an unbiased witness. Kit moves from assignment to assignment giving the narrative an erratic feel. Just when the drama seems to build, Kit moves on to something else, leaving a frustrated reader wondering how the last event was resolved. Another problem stems from Steavenson’s overreliance on philosophical discussions among her characters where little is ever resolved. Most of this does not seem to move the story along in meaningful ways. Despite these shortcomings, the novel is a worthy read. show less

Quite an education. This book gives not merely a historical flavour of the last thirty years in Iraq from the perspective of several characters closely associated with the regime, but an interesting insight into the psychological effect on those people of living under such extreme duress. The ambivalent nature of the Iraqui psyche appear to support the mental survival of the various people interviewed by Steavenson. Coping with the immense stress and constant fear of living under Saddam show more Hussein's dictatorship proves a need, above all, to keep silent. We have in Steavenson's narrative a vivid and compassionate portrayal of the Iraqui people as they accommodated their own individual morality to the every-changing reality of their personal experience. show less

Wendell Steavenson admits right up front that Saddam Hussein would have been unable to sustain his brutal dictatorship of Iraq without the help of those willing to carry out the horrible atrocities he directed. Be it war against neighboring countries, massacre of fellow Iraqis or torture prisons filled with those seen by Saddam to be a threat to his regime, he could not have managed it alone. Steavenson is not a naïve woman; she fully understands that her many interviews with former Iraqi show more Army officers have to be filtered through the eyes of a skeptic because those with whom she spoke were more interested in spinning a story that would justify what they personally did during the Saddam years than they were in telling the truth.

Despite her skepticism, Steavenson decided that the men deserved to be heard and the result is "The Weight of a Mustard Seed: An Iraqi General’s Moral Journey during the Time of Saddam." Not surprisingly, along with claiming to have never felt fear in battle, each of those interviewed claims to have always tried to limit the brutality of Saddam’s orders as best he could despite the danger to the lives of himself and his family for having done so. Iraqi military men, much as the Germans did after Hitler, have orally rewritten their history to the point that Saddam was the only bad person there and everyone else was, to varying degrees, one of his victims. Of course, that is a lie – and Steavenson does not pretend otherwise.

"The Weight of a Mustard Seed" focuses on General Kamel Sachet, a man eventually executed upon the orders of Saddam despite the fact that he was a Saddam favorite for most of his military career. Steavenson came to believe from all the interviews she conducted with Sachet’s fellow officers that he might have indeed had cleaner (though not clean) hands than most. However, she reminds the reader that she reached this conclusion by speaking with Iraqis, all the time fully aware that the art of duplicity is part of being an Iraqi, and that survival under the Saddam reign of terror required Iraqis to develop multiple personalities from which they could choose to fit the occasion.

What emerges from "The Weight of a Mustard Seed" is an inside look at the men who made it possible for Saddam to brutalize Iraq for so many years. Despite their attempts to hide the truth, and to make themselves look better than they were, the interviews reveal interesting detail about the military, the prisons, the purges and the tribal rivalries that made it all so easy for Saddam to surround himself with men as brutal as him. It is necessary to read between the lines and to compare the stories of different speakers, but one does come away with a sense of how Saddam was able to make Iraq into his personal playground for so many years.

Rated at: 4.0 show less