Here is a lovingly portrayed community in Baghdad at a time when suicide bombers are regularly blowing themselves and others up in residential neighboHere is a lovingly portrayed community in Baghdad at a time when suicide bombers are regularly blowing themselves and others up in residential neighborhoods. The people who survive go about their business. The portrayal of the ways ordinary life goes on reflects a kind of fatalistic unreality that I imagine is something close to how people cope in real war zones. The core metaphor is brilliant: The animated, ensouled corpse that is the titular character of the novel perfectly captures the absurdity of war, and his actions perfectly capture the futility of ever trying to "win" a war, and the impossibility of ever reaching an outcome where all deaths are avenged, all evil eradicated, and all good restored....more
The Rope has turned out to be the kind of book I'll recommend that people read even if I didn't love it. It begins with a deeply disturbing, masterfulThe Rope has turned out to be the kind of book I'll recommend that people read even if I didn't love it. It begins with a deeply disturbing, masterfully written scene of the execution of Saddam Hussein, then backtracks to give perspective on Iraq just after the US invaded and Saddam went into hiding. The novel has a lot to say about competing identities--what it means to identify as Iraqi, Baathist, Sunni or Shia, Pan-Arab, patriot, family member, and citizen of an occupied country. The way these loyalties shift and compete is the heart of this novel.
For my taste the writing trends toward overwrought, an easy mistake to make with this kind of material, except for the first scene which is very stripped down and works because of it. Another issue is that there is a lot of expository writing here--which is fair, given that Makiya's English-language version is for people not familiar with the facts on the ground--but the explaining sometimes got in the way of the storytelling and it made me wonder if the Arabic language version (the novel was published simultaneously in both languages) has less exposition.
I'm very glad to have read this novel in spite of my criticism. It's good to be reminded of what happened, to not forget the many disasters large and small that made up the Iraqi experience in these years....more
I think it's possible to write stories about terrible things without the reader feeling bludgeoned. The problem I have with these stories is that theyI think it's possible to write stories about terrible things without the reader feeling bludgeoned. The problem I have with these stories is that they are relentless in a way that I believe should be preserved for non-fiction or for visual representation of factual events. The blurb on the back of the Penguin edition claims that this collection "offers us a pageant of horrors, as haunting as the photos of Abu Ghraib..." but I say, look at the photos of Abu Ghraib instead. Fiction, language itself, implies logic and order, where even the most nihilistic writing is an act of faith.
A short story collection that I think succeeded in documenting terrible things, without sinking under its own weight, is Kolyma Tales by Varlam Shalamov....more
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