Frankenstein in Baghdad: A Novel

I have never given a 1-star rating until now. But this is truly one of the worst books I have ever read and the reasons for this are numerous. The author deserves this low rating for having wasted 8+ hours of my life.Note: I only bought and read this book because it was my book club's pick for the month. Even then, I barely made it through the entire book. I was honestly tempted on several occasions to abandon it completely - it was that painful. The first 50% is akin to plodding through mud mixed with molasses. Numerous times I lost concentration and had to reread many sentences. Like I said - it was painful. It somewhat picks up the pace in the second half, but it is then that you notice how truly bad it is, as the style and plot (or lack thereof) become more noticeable.Firstly, the writing is beyond poor. It has absolutely no soul. It is flat, simplistic, with staccato-like sentences. This "novel" reads more like an accountant's summary report than a novel. Not being able to read it in the original Arab language, I cannot say whether this is due to a (poor) translation or the author's actual lack of any writing talent. But either way, the phrasing is awkward, almost on par with a Google Translate experience. It is full of abrupt cuts and poor transitions. As an example: the protagonist enters a room in a brothel, and in the next paragraph he exits the brothel; no description, no plot development. Another example: he is riding in a car with another character (Nawal), and in the next paragraph, they are in a hotel cafeteria, with no transition or explanation how they got there.Secondly, and more unforgivably, the plot structure itself is a mess. The story D-R-A-G-S in the beginning half, then whisks by in the final 20%, making you feel the author himself got bored with the whole mess, or else was on a tight deadline to his publisher, and just wanted, or was forced, to wind everything up asap. In fact, he was in such a hurry to wrap things up, that he forgot all about the wooden panel that was found behind the Virgin statue at Hadi's place – a plot point touched upon several times, leading one to believe it was something of significance – but I guess not.The author has no notion of time structure: a thread of narrative rambles on into the future, then in the next paragraph/section (again without any transition) jumps back to some previous point.Thirdly, there is zero character development. I've read books where robots had more personality than any of the characters in this book. And purely as an observation, the only women in the book continue to perpetuate the female Arab stereotypes: the stupid, rambling old woman, the whore, the conniving yet guileless businesswoman-whore. Although to be fair, the men are not much more fleshed out…The (I assume) main character, Mahmoud al-Sawadi, would appear to be the alter-ego of the author, Ahmed Saadawi (Mahmoud being a derivation of Ahmed and Sawadi being almost an anagram of Saadawi), and as such gets the most character development. But even then, he remains a bland, unformed creature – not much different at the end of the book from what he was at the beginning.I totally fail to see how it won any, let alone top awards. The only even remotely plausible explanation I can think of is that someone had to have a “token” Arab work in their repertoire, because there can be no other explanation.

A must read. The surreal elements used to convey the politically relevant commentary uniquely brings to light the complexity of a region often viewed stereotypically. This book will leave you thinking. It will leave you wanting someone else you know to read it, so that you can verbally process the profound journey Saadawi took you on.Remember, this novel is translated and a lot is lost in translation. This should not be viewed as the fault of an author or a translator, but rather viewed with appreciation that’s English audiences have a small gateway into Iraqi and Arabic literature. For people less familiar with Iraqi names and those who struggle with numerous characters, there is a handy character list provided at the beginning of the novel with a brief description of who they are!

Baghdad in the early years of the American occupation: terror and sectarian violence reign supreme, suicide bombings happen daily, and the number of casualties mounts by the hour. A junk dealer collects and sews together the unclaimed body parts of terrorist victims in the hope of giving them a proper burial. But just as he sews on the last part, the Frankensteinish patchwork of organs is reanimated by the wandering soul of another bombing fatality. The desperate longing of the old lady next door then gives it a drive and a purpose: to avenge the various victims that make up its body before it rots away.Because of the noble nature of its quest, Whatsitsname—as the junk dealer calls the creature—attracts, despite its horrific appearance, numerous supporters and even disciples. In a city as torn apart by violence as this one, even a monster can obviously turn into a hero. And as it incorporates parts of people from all of Iraq’s ethnicities, tribes, races and social classes, which until now have always proven impossible to unite, Whatsitsname becomes, in the name of one of its disciples (and with a lot of irony from the author), ‘the first true Iraqi citizen’.But as time goes by and Whatsitsname keeps replacing its rotting body parts with new ones, many of which belong to criminals rather than victims, the creature also changes, from an avenger of justice to a bloodthirsty villain that readily kills innocents just to procure new body parts and prolong its existence. And so Whatsitsname turns from a symbol of hope for Baghdad into a scourge, and its easy, self-perpetuating evil becomes a brilliant allegory of the senselessness of war, which also usually starts for a noble cause and then quickly erodes into meaningless bloodshed.If this looks like a story you would like to read, you are not alone there, I would like that, too. Because however potent and captivating it is, Whatsitsname’s tale is unfortunately not really what Frankenstein in Baghdad is about. The creature's story takes up very little of the novel’s bulk, Whatsitsname is given a voice of its own for only a very short time (which is still arguably the best part of the novel) and is instead only referenced indirectly in the tales of the other characters.What Frankenstein in Baghdad does instead is provide alternate glimpses of the lives of several people from Iraq’s different ethnic and socioeconomic groups and of Whatsitsname’s impact on them. The point of view keeps jumping back and forth from one character to another, events tend to be told several times, from several different perspectives, until what has really happened is cast into doubt, and the plot meanders, sometimes moving at a speed that can only be described as glacial (if at all).I have seen a lot of opinions of this peculiar style of writing, from explaining it away as a ‘veritable portrayal of Iraq’s fractured society’ to simply calling it ‘lazy’ or ‘mediocre’. What matters the most is whether it actually works for the novel or not. And the truth is that sometimes it does, but sometimes it really doesn't. There were times when I was absolutely engrossed in the book and other times when I was so bored that I thought about ditching it. In the end, the only definite thing I can say about Frankenstein in Baghdad is that it offers a very interesting insight into a society I have known very little about until now, while the idea itself, about the monster vigilante turned villain, albeit brilliant, has a somewhat flawed execution.

A wonderfully written and consciously disturbing allegory of violent post Saddam Hussein’s Iraq. Mary Shelley’s Creature here stands for global revenge and serves as both the initiator and the victim of on going terror. Victor Frankenstein is equated with his creation and is thus forced to take responsibility. Still, this book is far from the quote from Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein it opens with; in itself it forms an innovative, magical-realistic tale.

I was really intrigued to read this, and thought it had an absolutely amazing concept. It does, but then it doesn't really seem to know what to do with it. It splits its POV through multiple characters, seemingly mostly for the sake of taking up space. It does a lot of interesting worldbuilding, but then doesn't really fulfill its own promise.

Browsing through the Man Booker International Prize 2018 longlist this novel appealed to me because of its setting, Baghdad, and political context, U.S. occupied Iraq in 2005. I can't say that I much enjoyed it despite its good-natured tone & agree with some other comments here that the novel peters out towards the end. I also had problems with some of the narrative devices: the novel is largely written in the third person yet towards the end the reader is addressed by 'the writer' in the first person to no useful effect, it just unnecessarily over-complicates the narrative and erodes the focus, as does the half-hearted framing device of a U.S. investigation into the 'Tracking and Pursuit Department'; the point of view too often randomly shifts to too many different characters, which had the effect of making them slightly cartoonish & too thinly drawn; the political/moral points are laboured, made slightly trite, as in the monster's ('Whaitsname') testimony where the creature's symbolic meaning is spelled out in upper case - there's not much subtlety in the writing or in the satire. Or put another way, I thought it was all a bit of a mess. Perhaps it was my expectation, hoping for an Iraqi Elias Khoury crossed with early Tom Sharpe, which made this novel such a letdown and made me wonder what on earth it was doing on the longlist alongside works by Laszlo Krasznahorkai, Olga Tokarczuk and Antonio Muñoz Molina.

This is an imaginative satire on Iraq after the fall of Saddam Hussein. It is 2005 and the inhabitants of Lane 7 In the Bataween district of Baghdad struggle to keep body and soul together in the chaos and violence. The lonely widow, Elishva, Ad Anwar the owner of the hotel with no guests, Father Josiah, the journalist Mahmoud, Hadi, the junk dealer and many more. Into their midst lopes Frankenstein.This Frankenstein is not the result of a scientific experiment, but the handiwork of the junk dealer, Hadi, who stitches him together from body parts recovered after car bombings. He christens him Whatsisname. On a stormy night Whatsisname comes alive, animated by a mission to avenge the victims who have contributed to his corpse - a finger from one, an eye from another, a nose from a third.The reader is left uncertain whether Whatsisname really exists or whether he is pure invention by Hadi, known for telling tall stories, by the journalist looking to make his own name or by the narrator of the novel who we know only as “the writer”. In many senses it does not really matter, So much else that was unbelievable turned out to be true in those years. But moreso Ahmed Saadawi offers a compelling metaphor for dislocation and destruction. I am wary about attaching western literary types to such an original and distinctive Arabic novel, but I was reminded of Beloved in Morrison’s eponymous novel.We often approach writing on Iraq expecting or desiring to find someone to blame. This is not something that drives this novel, war has its own portfolio of horrors. What is clear in Frankenstein in Baghdad is that neither the Americans nor the Iraqi authorities nor Whatsisname can bring order out of chaos, reverse entropy or reassemble a whole healthy body out of fragments of flesh and blood.I am really glad I read this and am encouraged to explore more contemporary fiction from the Middle East.

The opening and the final chapters explain how the events narrated came to be known to the author and the manuscript rescued. One of a huge cast of colourful Baghdadis assembles a corpse from "bits" left after explosions and it comes to life with the mission of avenging the dead from whose body parts he has been put together. However, the task expands exponentially, and his mission of exacting revenge is complicated by the realisation people are neither completely innocent nor completely guilty. The "thing's" nocturnal depredations are ineptly followed by the shadowy Pursuit and Tracking Department which employs a variety of astrologers, and preoccupy the inhabitants of Lane n° 7' whose crumbling houses portend the collapse of the traditional life of the neighbourhood, with its mixed population of Muslims and Christians. If events in Baghdad are extraordinary, still ordinary life continues despite everything. The story is narrated in broadly chronological order, but the chapters, reflecting different viewpoints, overlap. A great post-modern novel.

This was an intriguing and imaginative book, based around a very clever central premise, although it never quite managed to deliver on all its potential.Amidst the mayhem of the post-war period in Baghdad, following the demise of Saddam Hussein and the initial attempts by the invading forces to establish a sustainable administration, Hadi is roaming the streets, finding parts of bodies. He takes these home where he stitches them together, compiling a composite corpse. He recognises that this is bizarre, even grotesque, behaviour, but sees his work as a form of commentary or protest on the butchery that surrounds him. As the book opens, he has just ‘retrieved’ a nose which renders his work complete.Shortly afterwards, while Hadi is away celebrating with friends, Baghdad is subjected to an unusually fierce storm. When Hadi returns home, he finds that the composite corpse has gone. Meanwhile, a series of strange, and increasingly horrific murders, occur across the city.While the idea is diverting, I found the pace of the book, and the laboured characterisation, very frustrating. As always, of course, with works that I have read in translation, I was left wondering whether the deficiencies were down to the writer’s original work, or a dislocation of tone arising from the translator’s spin. I am glad to have read it, and wouldn’t have done so if it had not been for the hype surrounding the book’s nomination for this year’s Man Booker International Prize, but I suspect that that nomination might owe more to motives of political correctness than to assessment of genuine literary merit.

I loved the first 40-50 pages of “Frankenstein in Baghdad. They’re rich, full of surprising incidents and characters and darkly comic. I chortled out loud several times.And then… things seemed to slide a bit downhill. The laughs came fewer and further between. The focus narrows (mostly) to the journalist Mahmoud, who we follow in his quest to untangle the strange events unfolding. But he’s one of the least engaging characters in the book—a bit of a cipher, actually.It’s also a bit difficult to determine the book’s timeframe. At one point, the book’s Frankenstein figure describes the surprisingly large number of advisors and acolytes he attracts. But that would take more time than the book seems to cover. if you’re going to takes the sorts of flights of fancy this book does, it’s probably important to keep them grounded in reality. That’s one of the things the book’s opening does so well, the later chapters less so.In all fairness, I never felt I was in the hands of anything less than a very good storyteller. And yet after that smashing opening, it’s hard not to come away a little disappointed.