My third book by Antoon (and his first, tellingly) and I am sorry to say the first one that didn’t really impress me. The title refers to the practice of using diacritical dots in Arabic to make meaning clear because the same letters can mean (very) different things without those dots. The frame story is that a manuscript without dots in discovered in Iraqi security headquarters in 1989 and a memo asks for “qualified personnel…to insert the diacritics and write a brief report of the manuscript’s contents.” The vast majority of the book comprises the translated/interpreted manuscript. Occasional footnotes by the transcriber note possible double meanings but I found them to be very few (given the introduction’s explanation) and mostly reliant on wordplay. Recognizing that this kind of language-bound issue is particularly difficult to present in any translation, I cannot help but wonder how much more powerful or moving the original is. I found the English text limp, at least with regard to the point Antoon seems to be making about language as a means of interpreting our lives. The manuscript is written by a dissident student living in Baghdad under Saddam Hussein; he alternates incidents from his past, his present life in prison, and hoped-for reunions with his grandmother and girlfriend. What begins promisingly devolves into repetitive and increasingly incomprehensible material. Antoon has conceived a wonderful premise that, I suspect, is almost impossible to carry off in another language and while I have no way to know how successful it is in Arabic, I found it dismayingly unimpressive in English. ( )

I randomly stumbled across a used copy of this book at the bookstore and picked it up mostly because I hadn't read many books from Iraq. Months later it became my first read for the April in Arabia and Read the World 21 challenges on bookstagram.

This book is an experimental prison novel. The protagonist is arrested for reasons that are never really made explicit. The novel is told in non-linear fragments with the repeated refrain "I awoke to find myself (t)here." The fragments depict life under an authoritarian regime during the Iraq-Iran War, between the two American wars in the region. The story has a Kafkaesque feel, in a society where you are "free" to do anything but have your own thoughts or feelings, and public displays of gratitude are regularly insisted upon.

There is also a meta-narrative representing this book as a found document — specifically papers found in the prison in preparation for a move — handwritten without dots. Because in Arabic, dots can radically change one word to many others, it requires a level of translation by someone going in and adding the dots — the intended meaning usually clear by context, but not always. There were sometimes "notes from the translator" on this uncertainties.

Overall I found the form very effective in evoking the struggle to hold on to one's identity in such a dehumanizing system, and the power of language, writing, and reading. ( )

"I just want to recommend it to people! It's a sad book about a country that's unfortunately underrepresented in the reading list of most Americans."
read more: http://likeiamfeasting.blogspot.co.uk/2013/02/ijaam-sinan-antun.html ( )

A marvel, a journey, an amazing piece of storytelling. It went around my office like wildfire. ( )

This short book is set in Saddam Hussein's Iraq and purports to be the memoir of a student who ends up as a political prisoner. The conceit of the novel is that the i'jaam - dots added to Arabic script - have been left off leading to ambiguous (and presumably comical) meanings to some of the words, but even the author gets tired of this after a while. I wasn't too impressed by this book as it seemed to be trying to be too avant guarde without really delivering. ( )