Frankenstein in Baghdad
ABOUT
THE BOOK
From the rubble-strewn streets of U.S.-occupied Baghdad, Hadi – a scavenger and an oddball fixture at a local café collects human body parts and stitches them together to create a corpse. His goal, he claims, is for the government to recognize the parts as people and to give them proper burial. But when the corpse goes missing, a wave of eerie murders sweeps the city, and reports stream in of a horrendous-looking criminal who, though shot, cannot be killed. Hadi soon realizes he’s created a monster, one that needs human flesh to survive, first from the guilty, and then from anyone in its path.
Frankenstein in Baghdad captures with white-knuckle horror and black humour the surreal reality of contemporary Iraq.
ABOUT
THE TRANSLATOR Jonathan
Wright
Jonathan Wright is a British journalist and literary translator. He joined Reuters news agency in 1980 as a correspondent, and has been based in the Middle East for most of the last three decades. He has served as Reuters’ Cairo bureau chief, and he has lived and worked throughout the region, including in Egypt, Sudan, Lebanon, Tunisia and the Gulf. From 1998 to 2003, he was based in Washington, DC, covering US foreign policy for Reuters. For two years, until the autumn of 2011, Wright was editor of the Arab Media & Society Journal, published by the Kamal Adham Center for Journalism Training and Research at the American University in Cairo. He now lives in London.
Jonathan Wright is a British journalist and literary translator. He joined Reuters news agency in 1980 as a correspondent, and has been based in the Middle East for most of the last three decades. He has served as Reuters’ Cairo bureau chief, and he has lived and worked throughout the region, including in Egypt, Sudan, Lebanon, Tunisia and the Gulf. From 1998 to 2003, he was based in Washington, DC, covering US foreign policy for Reuters. For two years, until the autumn of 2011, Wright was editor of the Arab Media & Society Journal, published by the Kamal Adham Center for Journalism Training and Research at the American University in Cairo. He now lives in London.
NOMINATING LIBRARY COMMENTS
Frankenstein in Baghdad reflects on the events in the Iraqi capital in 2005 from a number of viewpoints. A central character, Hadi, collects body parts to sew them onto torn up corpses to allow them a proper burial and the possibility of peace in the afterlife. A soul enters the Frankenstein-like monster, it comes to life to take revenge on the guilty. However, the line between innocent and guilty can’t be drawn clearly. This is a violent, absurdist fable which depicts the war as pointless, chaotic and surreal. Borrowing its central idea from Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, it also incorporates elements of the Arabian Nights. Funny in a wicked way but politically relevant nonetheless, the book is brilliant and necessary reminder of the ongoing conflict.