Contemporary Authors

• Frankenstein in Baghdad: A Novel Penguin Books (New York, NY), 2017

1. Frankenstein in Baghdad : a novel LCCN 2017008182 Type of material Book Personal name Saʻdāwī, Aḥmad author. Uniform title Frānkshtāyin fī Baghdād. English Main title Frankenstein in Baghdad : a novel / Ahmed Saadawi ; translated from the Arabic by Jonathan Wright. Published/Produced New York, New York : Penguin Books, 2017. Projected pub date 1711 Description pages cm ISBN 9780143128793 Library of Congress Holdings Information not available.

• Amazon -

  Ahmed Saadawi is an Iraqi novelist, poet, screenwriter, and documentary filmmaker. He is the first Iraqi to win the International Prize for Arabic Fiction; he won in 2014 for Frankenstein in Baghdad, which also won France’s Grand Prize for Fantasy. In 2010 he was selected for Beirut39, as one of the 39 best Arab authors under the age of 39. He was born in 1973 in Baghdad, where he still lives.

• Andrew Nurnberg Associates - http://andrewnurnberg.com/book-author/ahmed-saadawi/

  Ahmed Saadawi is an Iraqi novelist, poet and screenwriter, born in 1973 in Baghdad, where he works as a documentary filmmaker. He is the author of a volume of poetry, Anniversary of Bad Songs (2000), and three novels, The Beautiful Country (2004), Indeed He Dreams or Plays or Dies (2008) and Frankenstein in Baghdad (2013), for which he was awarded the International Prize for Arabic Fiction. He has won several prizes and in 2010 was selected for the Beirut39, as one of the 39 best Arabic authors below the age of forty.

• New York Times - https://www.nytimes.com/2014/05/17/world/middleeast/iraqi-novelist-dodging-bombs-writes-to-clear-the-fog-of-war.html

  Baghdad Is a Setting, and a Character, Too
  The Saturday Profile
  By TIM ARANGO MAY 16, 2014
  Continue reading the main story
  Share This Page
  Share
  Tweet
  Email
  More
  Save
  Photo

  “The most important thing that has happened to me is that I am still alive.” Ahmed Saadawi
  Credit
  Max Becherer for The New York Times
  BAGHDAD — ON an evening just a few days before his novel would win a top Arabic literary prize, Ahmed Saadawi was relaxing with his writer friends at a Baghdad cafe, a place so special to him that he had written it into his book.
  About an hour after he left, a suicide bomber struck, wounding several of his friends and killing some others. It was a common enough experience for Mr. Saadawi — as it is for anyone who has lived for the last decade in Baghdad, where the simple matter of timing can determine who lives and who dies.
  “The most important thing that has happened to me is that I am still alive,” he said.
  Yet as friends have died, or left the country, he has stayed.
  “It’s an internal conflict for me,” he said, “between my need to write novels and be connected to the people, and my fear of death and desire to keep living.”
  Mr. Saadawi, his bearing a mix of stoicism, sadness and generosity that has come to define the collective Iraqi character, is at the vanguard of a small group of writers starting to interpret, through fiction, the trauma wrought from the American invasion of 2003.
  Continue reading the main story

  ADVERTISEMENT
  Continue reading the main story

  His surrealist novel, “Frankenstein in Baghdad,” for which he recently won the International Prize for Arabic Fiction, is the tale of a drunken scavenger who collects body parts from the city’s bombing scenes and stitches them together to form a body. The figure is then inhabited by a wayward soul who sets out to seek revenge for the victims. The body, referred to as “shesma,” an Arabic word meaning “what’s his name,” eventually kills innocents too, reflecting the madness and moral ambiguities of the war and its aftermath.
  “I am trying to bring together all of the elements of the Iraqi experience,” Mr. Saadawi said. “There are many messages. One of them is that with this war and violence, no one is innocent.”
  In a city with a grand, centuries-old cultural heritage, where streets and squares are named after long-dead poets, Mr. Saadawi, the first Iraqi novelist to win what is commonly called the Arabic Booker Prize, is Baghdad’s new literary star, his recognition having given inspiration to the city’s beleaguered creative class.
  “He has given us faith that Iraq is still alive, and we are the ones who can make change if we have the will,” said Ibrahim Abdul Jabbar, another Iraqi novelist.
  The prize also brought him $50,000 and a guarantee that the book would be translated into English.
  BORN in 1973, Mr. Saadawi grew up poor in the Shiite-dominated slum of Sadr City, the son of a driving instructor. He turned to writing after graduating from a local teachers’ college. Married now, with four children, he says he will use the prize money to retire the debts he racked up as he pursued fiction writing and his other passions: drawing cartoons and producing documentary films.
  “I’m not good with money,” he said.
  The years of conflict since the American invasion is territory already traversed by American service members turned novelists. Kevin Powers, an Army veteran, wrote the well-received novel “The Yellow Birds,” and a recent short story collection, “Redeployment,” was written by Phil Klay, a veteran of the Marines.
  For the Americans, though, turning their experiences into fiction is a retrospective act, because their war ended. For Iraqis like Mr. Saadawi, the war is still their present, haunting their reality even as they try to make the best of it — going to work in the morning, putting dinner on the table, watering the plants.
  Mr. Saadawi’s cafe quickly reopened after the attack, not uncommon in Baghdad, where the window pane salesman sometimes shows up just hours after a bombing. The owner, Mazin Hasham, who lost his brother in the bombing, said on the day the cafe opened its doors again, “I’m too sad to read the book.”
  Mr. Saadawi, who admires the spare prose of Hemingway, said of the cafe, “It was simple, and everyone went there.”
  The novel reflects Mr. Saadawi’s belief that fiction is better suited than journalism and memoirs to convey the full emotional experience of living in a city where extraordinary levels of violence have become ordinary. “Things such as the lack of trust among people, the absence of law, the absence of security, increased fear,” he said.
  Newsletter Sign Up
  Continue reading the main story
  The Interpreter Newsletter
  Understand the world with sharp insight and commentary on the major news stories of the week.

  Sign Up

  You agree to receive occasional updates and special offers for The New York Times's products and services.

  See Sample Privacy Policy Opt out or contact us anytime

  Borrowing from another literary hero, Gabriel García Márquez, Mr. Saadawi deployed magical realism to great effect in “Frankenstein in Baghdad,” mixing fantasy and the city’s macabre reality.
  “The element of fantasy adds a touch of joy to the work, mitigating its cruelty,” he said in an interview with Mustafa Najjar, an Arabic literary critic.
  Baghdad itself emerges as a formidable character in Mr. Saadawi’s novel, a hometown that he describes as a “dystopia,” and “hell on earth.”
  HIS Frankenstein rises from the grimy and cluttered streets of the Bataween district, which sprawls across central Baghdad between Tahrir Square and Firdos Square, where liberated Iraqis, with an assist from American Marines, dragged down a statue of Saddam Hussein in 2003.
  It is a neighborhood of vice, the sort of urban landscape that often draws writers’ attention. There are prostitutes. There are drugs. There is booze, barbershops and cafes, where old men spend afternoons drinking tea, smoking and playing dominoes. There are immigrants: Sudanese who once gave the area the nickname “the African ghetto,” and Arabs from Egypt.
  “Each country has a Bataween,” said Jamal al-Masry, who works at a coffee shop and came here from Egypt in the 1990s. He didn’t realize that he had inspired one of Mr. Saadawi’s characters and that his coffee shop was an important place in the novel.
  “Bataween is a place for fun,” he continued. “You can find anything you want here. Hookers, drugs, alcohol. You have freedom here.”
  But it has a history that tells of a past Baghdad, a tapestry of different sects, faiths and ethnicities. Once Jews lived there, and then Christians, before the city became unwelcoming for them.
  “Bataween was a great place when the Jewish were here,” said Ali Shamikh, who was smoking a cigarette while getting a straight-razor shave in a barbershop on the street where most of the novel’s action takes place. “The Christians came after, and it remained a great place until the ’90s. When the Christians started to leave, it became a place for sinners.”
  Baghdad’s literary life plays out every Friday, the Muslim Sabbath, as a sort of rollicking street fair on Mutanabbi Street, for centuries the home of the city’s booksellers. On a recent Friday, a man was looking for “Frankenstein in Baghdad” to take with him to Malaysia, a common vacation spot for Iraqis because it is one of the few countries where they do not need visas. Like everyone else, though, he could not find one.
  One bookseller, Abbas Jasim, said: “Everyone comes here asking me for a copy of this novel, but we are out of it now. The demand is too big.”
  Up the street, Mr. Saadawi sat in the front row of a packed little auditorium, waiting to take the stage in a ceremony honoring him and clearly relishing his new fame. He snapped a selfie before giving some brief remarks, and then hung around until everyone who wanted a picture with him got one, a wide smile on his face the whole time. He also told those who could not find the book among the street’s stalls that they could download a free copy online.
  Baghdad’s cultural life has been degraded over decades of dictatorship, sanctions, invasion and occupation. Writers today say that it is impossible to earn a living as an author.
  Mr. Saadawi, though, offered a simple message to his fellow writers, saying, “All you need is a desk and a pack of cigarettes.”

• The National - https://www.thenational.ae/arts-culture/frankenstein-in-baghdad-to-be-released-in-english-we-speak-to-ahmed-saadawi-1.702127

  ‘Frankenstein In Baghdad' to be released in English: we speak to Ahmed Saadawi

  As an English translation of ‘Frankenstein In Baghdad’ is unleashed, the author tells us how the civil war exposed Iraq’s dark side

  Ben East
  February 6, 2018
  Updated: February 6, 2018 01:09 PM
  121
  shares

  When Ahmed Saadawi finished writing "Frankenstein in Baghdad", a dark fantasy about the war that tore Iraq apart a decade ago, he thought his novel dealt with the past. But just like the monster Mary Shelley first dreamt up exactly 200 years ago, Saadawi's hero took on a life of its own. AFP
  A grotesque, unnamed creature sculpted by human hand escapes onto the streets, bringing mayhem and murder. As we celebrate the 200th anniversary of Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, it might sound familiar, but this particular monster roams the dark streets of an Iraqi city at war with itself after the 2003 United States-led invasion. Stitched together from the body parts of people killed through
  incessant violence, he’s hell-bent on putting right the wrongs of a corrupt country. He’s savage, but thoughtful. Or as Frankenstein in Baghdad’s author Ahmed Saadawi puts it, “he kills gently and with profound philosophical motives”.
  If Frankenstein in Baghdad – published in English this week – sounds timely then this is only slightly deliberate. Saadawi says he started thinking about this ambitious novel 10 years ago, as a way of processing how, during the civil war that raged in the Iraqi capital since 2003, it seemed that “this monster awoke in us all… how we became either active participants in the killing or indifferent towards scenes of death”.
  'Iraqi society has created permanent forms of fantasy'
  Frankenstein in Baghdad won the International Prize For Arabic Fiction in 2014, and as Malcolm Forbes wrote in The National last week, “Jonathan Wright’s expert translation conveys Saadawi’s sense of drama and stasis, fine-grained brutality and dreamlike absurdity. This isn’t a novel for the faint-hearted, but it is one that tells a vital story in a masterful way.”
  Saadawi says: “I do hope English readers will enjoy it as a work of art. But also that it will be a chance for them to find out about Iraq and Baghdad through the eyes of a local writer, beyond what appears in the media or in news coverage.”
  Frankenstein in Baghdad is one of those rare novels that manages to juggle literary ambition, political and social metaphor, and pure page-turning readability. It’s an inventive, often comic fantasy with a genuine desire to pick apart a city where “no innocents are completely innocent and no criminals are completely criminal”.
  “I find fantasy essential for several reasons,” says Saadawi. “It gives vitality and brings out the overwhelming imaginative powers of writing. But there is a deeper reason for me. Iraqi society itself has created permanent forms of fantasy – and treats them as facts.”
  Saadawi tells me of a story that did the rounds during the confrontations between the US Army and Sunni gunmen in Fallujah, where some people claimed that a massive spider had come down from the sky, sent by God, and had started killing the American soldiers. It’s just one of dozens of stories he says which were invented during the Iraq War – maybe for no other reason than that they helped to mask the horrific reality.
  “People with logical minds understand the need for imagination in times of crisis and violence,” says Saadawi.
  “For example, the belief that I will get home safe and won’t be killed in an explosion is what enables me to leave home in the morning, although there is no logical calculation that supports this belief.
  The monster: senseless sectarian violence
  “It’s just an imaginary assumption needed for self-preservation.” This is the reality of the situation in Frankenstein in Baghdad – car bombs are constantly going off, and it’s the lost soul of one of the many victims who animates the stitched-together corpse to start his revenge mission. In fact, the monster – which people call Whatsitsname – becomes a representation of this impossible to imagine, senseless sectarian violence in Iraq, specifically because he is made up of the body parts from all the different facets of Iraqi identity.
  “He is the mirror image of us as a whole,” says Saadawi. “In Iraq – and many Arab and Islamic countries – there is a violent internal conflict over identity. Are we Arabs or Muslims, Sunnis or Shia? Are we in Mesopotamia or in the Arabian peninsula?
  “In the 100 years since the creation of the modern state, we haven’t been able to create a cohesive national identity to which everyone feels they belong. Fed by politicians and men of religion, people cling to pure, micro-identities, but we have to accept the diversity and pluralism in ourselves, and then accept the diversity in society.”
  Saadawi thinks that this climate was always likely to lead to the kind of civil war that took place in Baghdad between 2005 and 2007, and which provides the setting for his novel. The problem is, he’s not so sure that the causes have been tackled to this day.
  “Influential men in all these sects or ethnicities have not said that some people in their communities are criminals. They all portray themselves as angels, as if the criminals who planted bombs and murdered came from the moon. So as long as we don’t admit guilt and remorse, the Whatsitsname is still alive and can easily come back to life again.”
  Hope in Baghdad?
  And the interesting idea in Frankenstein in Baghdad is that Whatsitsname is a bogeyman figure, conjured up by everyone’s fears. So, 10 years on, does Saadawi still see those fears?
  “Many young people, for example, still feel pessimistic about the situation in Iraq. Corruption is rampant, there are armed groups, many areas of the country remain without development, and there is high unemployment. The education system is very poor. People are exhausted and have a strong desire to see something magical happen that will give them confidence that violence will not return and that the war with Islamic State [ISIL] was Iraq’s last war.”
  But, amid Saadawi’s vision for a better Baghdad – from the obvious desire for “complete security stability” to the enthusiastic calls for more tourism and the rather more prosaic hope that the traffic bottlenecks are eased – he does see cause for hope.
  “Baghdad is more stable today and you can see foreigners wandering the streets of Karrada in the city centre. This is something that gives a sense of calm and suggests that the city is improving.”
  And as for Saadawi himself, the IPAF win and the spotlight that came with it was, for a while, difficult to deal with. “I lost some of my freedom of movement and freedom to write,” he says. But he was also able to influence what he calls “a certain segment of people” on public affairs, which, given his thoughtful and progressive views on Baghdadi life, can only be a good thing.
  With the film rights to Frankenstein in Baghdad recently signed off to a British company, he’s unlikely to shrink into the background, in any case. “There are good things and bad things about celebrity, but a writer has to forget it quickly so that he can go back to his desk to write something new,” he says.
  Which was The Chalk Door, a bestseller in Arabic last January. Saadawi says it covers different ground to Frankenstein In Baghdad, which is probably for the best given that he still finds discussing the first decades of 21st-century Iraqi life painful.
  “During the civil war I was a correspondent for the Arabic service of the BBC and I roamed the streets of Baghdad every day as part of my job,” he says. “And If I could go back in time, I would have fled. The memory of that time weighs heavily and harshly. He who preserves memories of this kind is not a lucky man.”
  Frankenstein in Baghdad by Ahmed Saadawi is translated by Jonathan Wright and is published by Oneworld

War baby; "Frankenstein" reimagined

The Economist. 426.9079 (Feb. 17, 2018): p74(US).
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2018 Economist Intelligence Unit N.A. Incorporated
http://store.eiu.com/
Full Text:
Torn apart and stitched together
"I'M THE first true Iraqi citizen." Such is the bold claim of the monster in Ahmed Saadawi's "Frankenstein in Baghdad". His misanthropic creator--an alcoholic, bitter junk-dealer--assembled him out of an ethnically diverse assortment of body parts, scavenged carefully from the remains of suicide-bombing victims. The Whatsitsname, as the creature is known, represents the "impossible mix that was never achieved in the past".
At first glance, a 19th-century gothic novel set between the Alps and the Arctic might seem an unlikely vehicle to explore the social intricacies of war-ravaged, American-occupied Baghdad. But the conceit proves surprisingly apt. Like his precursor, the Whatsitsname is an existentially bereft soul thirsting to make sense of his existence, ultimately by exacting revenge on his maker. However, in the context of the fighting, vengeance is an ever-expanding task. Is his real creator the suicide-bomber (who is already dead)? The American forces? The Iraqi police? As the monster grows, so too does his list of targets.
Mr Saadawi's novel, rendered accessibly into English by Jonathan Wright, won the International Prize for Arabic Fiction. It is more than an extended metaphor for the interminable carnage in Iraq and the precarious nature of its body politic. It also intimately depicts the lives of those affected by the conflict. Since the invasion of 2003, reflections of the war in English-language fiction have exhibited a natural but limiting propensity to focus on American soldiering and trauma. In Mr Saadawi's story, set in 2005, the Americans are reduced to background noise. The buzz of Apaches is heard overhead, but the helicopters themselves are never seen: they represent a force even more spectral than the monster haunting the streets of Baghdad.
The cast of characters is a disparate patchwork of Iraqi citizenry, much like the Whatsitsname himself. We meet an ex-Baathist army official, a broke hotel owner, an ageing Assyrian Christian woman, an idealistic young journalist. Despite its title, the bulk of the novel is devoted to these secondary characters as they navigate the banal side of violent strife. They wonder what to do about the lack of tourism, or where to find a working telephone to call relatives.
Unlike the monster that connects them, the novel's various threads never quite converge into something greater than the sum of their parts. But perhaps this is fitting. Taken separately they offer a glimpse into the day-to-day experiences of a society fractured by bloodshed.
Frankenstein in Baghdad.
By Ahmed Saadawi. Translated by Jonathan Wright.
Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
"War baby; 'Frankenstein' reimagined." The Economist, 17 Feb. 2018, p. 74(US). General OneFile, http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A527674976/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=ITOF&xid=cc1987d9. Accessed 20 Feb. 2018.

Gale Document Number: GALE|A527674976

Frankenstein in Baghdad

Daniel Kraus
Booklist. 114.7 (Dec. 1, 2017): p40.
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2017 American Library Association
http://www.ala.org/ala/aboutala/offices/publishing/booklist_publications/booklist/booklist.cfm
Full Text:
* Frankenstein in Baghdad.
By Ahmed Saadawi. Tr. by Jonathan Wright.
Jan. 2018. 300p. Penguin, paper, $16 (9780143128793).

There is no shortage of wonderful, literate Frankenstein reimaginings--try Laurie Sheck's A Monster's Notes (2009) or Dave Zeltserman's Monster (2012)--but few so viscerally mine Shelley's story for its metaphoric riches: "Everywhere we're dying," writes Saadawi, "from the same fear of dying." Saadawi places readers in his hometown of U.S.-occupied Baghdad circa 2005, where Hadi has begun collecting body parts strewn from bombings. By stitching them together into the shape of a body, he wishes to honor and remember the dead. But the body vanishes. The monster is alive, imbued with a sort of soul by a grieving mother who believes it is her son returned from war. The monster begins killing, first as righteous revenge upon those responsible for murdering the people from whom he's stitched. But soon, he needs more body parts just to replace what is decomposing, and his morals fade into gray. Meanwhile, journalist Mahmoud al-Sawadi comes ever closer to this mass murderer known as Criminal X. In graceful, economical prose, Saadawi places us in a city of ghosts, where missing people return all the time, justice is fleeting, and even good intentions rot. "I am the first true Iraqi citizen," muses the monster, who is a "composite of victims" as much as he is his own extremist. A haunting and startling mix of horror, mystery, and tragedy.--Daniel Kraus
Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
Kraus, Daniel. "Frankenstein in Baghdad." Booklist, 1 Dec. 2017, p. 40. General OneFile, http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A519036254/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=ITOF&xid=6981615d. Accessed 20 Feb. 2018.

Gale Document Number: GALE|A519036254

Saadawi, Ahmed: FRANKENSTEIN IN BAGHDAD

Kirkus Reviews. (Oct. 15, 2017):
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2017 Kirkus Media LLC
http://www.kirkusreviews.com/
Full Text:
Saadawi, Ahmed FRANKENSTEIN IN BAGHDAD Penguin (Adult Fiction) $16.00 1, 23 ISBN: 978-0-14-312879-3
A horrifying creature stalks the bombed-out streets of postwar Baghdad, seeking vengeance.
This outrageously adroit horror metaphor deservedly won author Saadawi (Indeed He Dreams or Plays or Dies, 2008, etc.) the 2014 International Prize for Arabic Fiction and now arrives on Western shores with a deft translation by Wright (The Longing of the Dervish, 2016, etc.). The book chronicles the unexpected exploits of Hadi, a rag-and-bone man barely tolerated in his war-torn neighborhood. We the readers are basically eavesdropping as Hadi tells his bizarre tale to local journalist Mahmoud al-Samedi. When Hadi's assistant, Nahem, dies in a car bombing, the junkman nobly goes to collect the body for burial only to find an assortment of body parts from a variety of people. "I made it complete so it wouldn't be treated as trash, so it would be respected like other dead people and given a proper burial," Hadi says in explaining the Frankenstein's monster-like creature he assembles. But this being a horror tale, the spirit of a young man named Hasib Mohamed Jaafar takes root in the creature, which Hadi takes to calling "Whatsitsname." And Whatsitsname is mad, too, killing those responsible for the deaths embodied in its parts. As it replaces rotting body parts and continues its mission, it becomes stronger, deadlier, and more articulate. "With the help of God and of heaven, I will take revenge on all the criminals," it swears. "I will finally bring about justice on earth, and there will no longer be a need to wait in agony for justice to come, in heaven or after death." As a metaphor for the cycle of violence, it's quite nuanced, but Saadawi's black sense of humor and grotesque imagery keep the novel grounded in its genre. Call it "Gothic Arabesque," but this haunting novel brazenly confronts the violence visited upon this country by those who did not call it home.
A startling way to teach an old lesson: an eye for an eye makes the whole world blind.
Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
"Saadawi, Ahmed: FRANKENSTEIN IN BAGHDAD." Kirkus Reviews, 15 Oct. 2017. General OneFile, http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A509244149/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=ITOF&xid=b3c2b775. Accessed 20 Feb. 2018.

Gale Document Number: GALE|A509244149

Frankenstein in Baghdad

Publishers Weekly. 264.41 (Oct. 9, 2017): p40.
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2017 PWxyz, LLC
http://www.publishersweekly.com/
Full Text:
Frankenstein in Baghdad
Ahmed Saadawi, trans, from the Arabic by
Jonathan Wright. Penguin, $16 trade paper
(288p) ISBN 978-0-14-312879-3
Saadawi's novel begins with an intriguing question: "Have you seen a naked corpse walking down the street?" So asks Hadi, a local junk collector in Baghdad during the American invasion and dreadful, subsequent war. At least at first, his neighbors appear unconcerned because "Hadi was a liar and everyone knew it." However, in the wake of suicide bombings and other brutal acts of violence, Hadi has been collecting body parts, just has he has always collected other bits of this and that. Saving the limbs and hunks of flesh, Hadi stitches a kind of body back together, claiming, "I 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." Unfortunately, "Whatsitsname," as Hadi comes to call his creation, becomes sentient, his spirit revived by an old woman who has been mourning her own son for 20 years, even since he was killed during the previous American war. And the monster becomes just that, a violent, terrifying murderer who, like the war itself, takes on a life its own, beyond logic, reason, or control. While the Frankenstein through line doesn't quite hold Saadawi's novel together, the book is successful as a portrait of a neighborhood, and a way of life, under siege. When a local real estate agent named Faraj is questioned by Americans on the morning after Whatsitsname commits a particularly grisly murder, he considers the troops who have come to occupy his country. "As suddenly as the wind could shift, they could throw you in a dark hole." This is a harrowing and affecting look at the day-to-day life of war-torn Iraq. (Jan.)
Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
"Frankenstein in Baghdad." Publishers Weekly, 9 Oct. 2017, p. 40. General OneFile, http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A511293288/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=ITOF&xid=b9be09c5. Accessed 20 Feb. 2018.

Gale Document Number: GALE|A511293288

"War baby; 'Frankenstein' reimagined." The Economist, 17 Feb. 2018, p. 74(US). General OneFile, http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A527674976/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=ITOF&xid=cc1987d9. Accessed 20 Feb. 2018. Kraus, Daniel. "Frankenstein in Baghdad." Booklist, 1 Dec. 2017, p. 40. General OneFile, http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A519036254/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=ITOF&xid=6981615d. Accessed 20 Feb. 2018. "Saadawi, Ahmed: FRANKENSTEIN IN BAGHDAD." Kirkus Reviews, 15 Oct. 2017. General OneFile, http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A509244149/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=ITOF&xid=b3c2b775. Accessed 20 Feb. 2018. "Frankenstein in Baghdad." Publishers Weekly, 9 Oct. 2017, p. 40. General OneFile, http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A511293288/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=ITOF&xid=b9be09c5. Accessed 20 Feb. 2018.

• New York Times Book Review
  https://www.nytimes.com/2018/01/22/books/review-frankenstein-in-baghdad-ahmed-saadawi.html
  Word count: 1193

  In ‘Frankenstein in Baghdad,’ a Fantastical Manifestation of War’s Cruelties
  Books of The Times
  By DWIGHT GARNER JAN. 22, 2018
  Continue reading the main story
  Share This Page
  Share
  Tweet
  Pin
  Email
  More
  Save
  8
  Photo

  Credit
  Patricia Wall/The New York Times
  There are a lot of explosions in “Frankenstein in Baghdad,” Ahmed Saadawi’s intense and surreal novel. People are knocked down, blown backward, tossed into the air. Sometimes a foot or an arm is left in the street. Sometimes all that’s left is pink mist.
  Saadawi is an Iraqi writer, and this novel, his first to be translated into English, is set in U.S.-occupied Baghdad. Sectarian violence has metastasized. Car bombs go off with almost metronomic regularity, each crunching blast a fresh bulletin from hell.
  Through this madness toddles Hadi, a junk peddler, as if he were Charlie Chaplin’s tramp. He’s a simple fellow who likes to drink ouzo and, when he can afford it, sleep with the local prostitutes.
  Hadi is used to picking up stray objects. One day he starts to bring home body parts, left in the streets from the day’s explosions. He feels they deserve a proper burial. He begins to stitch these bits together, in the hope that if he can create a whole corpse someone will bury it.
  Continue reading the main story
  Recent Comments
  David desJardins January 24, 2018
  The implication that things would be so much better now in Iraq if it had been left in the hands of the ruthless Saddam Hussein and his...
  Number23 January 24, 2018
  It boggles my mind that any expression of art can emerge from that place, post US invasion. As horrific as Trump has been in his first year,...
  Rhporter January 24, 2018
  What is the point of suggesting that Blair and bush ought to be killed by the monster? It’s evidently not in the book. Just gratuitous...
  See All Comments
  ADVERTISEMENT
  Continue reading the main story

  You can see where this is heading. Hadi returns home one evening and his oozing creature has fled, without bothering to leave a note.
  What follows, in this assured and hallucinatory story, is funny and horrifying in a near-perfect admixture. Funny because Saadawi wrings a good deal of black humor out of the way the monster’s pieces fall off at inopportune moments.
  He delves into its “serious putrefaction problems.” The creature is blamed for a series of murders. All the authorities know is that he’s terrible to look at, so they begin rounding up all the ugly people in Baghdad as suspects.
  Photo

  Ahmed Saadawi
  Credit
  Safa Alwan
  Saadawi’s tone can be sly, but his intentions are deadly serious. He’s written a complex allegory for the tribal cruelties in Iraq in the wake of the American invasion. His book is especially moving about women who have lost their sons and husbands, and who wonder if they are alive and will ever return. In Iraq, the dead sometimes really do return, from dungeons among other places.
  “Frankenstein in Baghdad” is about many things other than a creature who terrorizes the city at night. It’s a real estate novel in which there are struggles over old houses and hotels. It’s a journalism novel; one central character is an editor who chases the creature’s story.
  We meet barbers and hotel guards and astrologers and film directors. A lot of kebabs and tripe and boiled beans are consumed, washed down with glasses of arak. Shishas are smoked; lusty thoughts are entertained. Saadawi wedges a lot of humanity into his narrative.
  Like the monster in Mary Shelley’s “Frankenstein; Or, The Modern Prometheus” (1818), Saadawi’s creature feels he is misunderstood. He’s not a bad guy, he wishes to explain. He’s not killing at random. Instead, he’s after revenge. He is killing the men whose bombs created his parts.
  Newsletter Sign Up
  Continue reading the main story
  Book Review
  Be the first to see reviews, news and features in The New York Times Book Review.

  Sign Up

  You agree to receive occasional updates and special offers for The New York Times's products and services.

  See Sample Privacy Policy Opt out or contact us anytime

  The creature becomes a media obsession. It grants interviews. It thinks things like, “Because I’m made up of body parts of people from diverse backgrounds — ethnicities, tribes, races and social classes — I represent the impossible mix that never was achieved in the past. I’m the first true Iraqi citizen.”
  If the creature is after revenge, you begin to wonder, why does he not commandeer a jet and lumber after George W. Bush and Tony Blair? If this monster thinks globally, however, he is committed to murdering locally.
  Some think the monster is merely a manifestation of people’s fears. He assures them he is more than that. In any case, as Toni Morrison put in “Song of Solomon,” “What difference do it make if the thing you scared of is real or not?”
  The creature experiences its own sort of mission creep. He starts by killing only bad men. Before long he realizes that he needs replacement parts. He begins killing nearly at random in order to acquire them. Who among us is not part evil?, he rationalizes.
  In this translation from the Arabic by Jonathan Wright, Saadawi blends the unearthly, the horrific and the mundane to terrific effect. It is no surprise to learn that he won the International Prize for Arabic Fiction, a kind of Booker Prize for the region, for “Frankenstein in Baghdad.” There’s a freshness to both his voice and vision; he is working through a country’s trauma from a series of unusual angles.
  There are moments you feel you are reading a war story. At other moments, the book unloads a freight of black magic. We meet a journalist who is compiling an anthology of “the 100 strangest Iraqi stories.” We learn of the activities of the Tracking and Pursuit Department, which monitors unusual crimes, investigates urban legends and makes predictions about future attacks.
  Ghosts hover over bridges. Four beggars are found dead in a “weird tableau,” each with his hands around the neck of the one in front of him. A woman’s phone number is 666, only the first sign she might have boundary issues.
  You get the sense, throughout “Frankenstein in Baghdad,” that Saadawi’s creature, alive with malevolent intelligence, is feeding off its own destructive energy.
  The reader feeds off it as well. What happened in Iraq was a spiritual disaster, and this brave and ingenious novel takes that idea and uncorks all its possible meanings.
  Follow Dwight Garner on Twitter: @DwightGarner.
  FRANKENSTEIN IN BAGHDAD
  By Ahmed Saadawi
  281 pages. Penguin Books. $16.

Word Count