Frankenstein in Baghdad

Zusatztext 108259771 Informationen zum Autor 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. Klappentext Man Booker International Prize finalist "Brave and ingenious." -The New York Times "Gripping! darkly humorous . . . profound." -Phil Klay! bestselling author and National Book Award winner for Redeployment "Extraordinary . . . A devastating but essential read." -Kevin Powers! bestselling author and National Book Award finalist for The Yellow Birds 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. A prizewinning novel by "Baghdad's new literary star" (The New York Times)! Frankenstein in Baghdad captures with white-knuckle horror and black humor the surreal reality of contemporary Iraq. Chapter One The Madwoman 1 The explosion took place two minutes after Elishva, the old woman known as Umm Daniel, or Daniel's mother, boarded the bus. Everyone on the bus turned around to see what had happened. They watched in shock as a ball of smoke rose, dark and black, beyond the crowds, from the car park near Tayaran Square in the center of Baghdad. Young people raced to the scene of the explosion, and cars collided into each other or into the median. The drivers were frightened and confused: they were assaulted by the sound of car horns and of people screaming and shouting. Elishva's neighbors in Lane 7 said later that she had left the Bataween district to pray in the Church of Saint Odisho, near the University of Technology, as she did every Sunday, and that's why the explosion happened-many of the locals believed that, with her spiritual powers, Elishva prevented bad things from happening when she was among them. Sitting on the bus, minding her own business, as if she were deaf or not even there, Elishva didn't hear the massive explosion about two hundred yards behind her. Her frail body was curled up by the window, and she looked out without seeing anything, thinking about the bitter taste in her mouth and the sense of gloom that she had been unable to shake off for the past few days. The bitter taste might disappear after she took Holy Communion. Hearing the voices of her daughters and their children on the phone, she would have a little respite from her melancholy, and the light would shine again in her cloudy eyes. Father Josiah would usually wait for his cell phone to ring and then tell Elishva that Matilda was on the line, or if Matilda didn't call on time, Elishva might wait another hour and then ask the priest to call Matilda. This had been repeated every Sunday for at least two years. Before that, Elishva's daughters had called irregularly on the land line at church. But then when the Americans invaded Baghdad, their missiles destroyed the telephone exchange, and the phones were cut off for many months. Death stalked the city like the plague, and Elishva's daught...

Winner of the International Prize for Arabic Fiction
Winner of France’s Grand Prize for Fantasy
Winner of The Kitschies’ Golden Tentacle Award for Best Debut
Longlisted for the International Dublin Literary Award

“This profound, gripping book refreshes a centuries-old scary story into today’s landscape.” —The Today Show

“The book I can’t get out of my head? The haunting, brutal and funny Frankenstein in Baghdad.” —John Schwartz, The New York Times Book Review

“In the 200 years since Mary Shelley wrote Frankenstein, her monster has turned up in countless variations—but few of them have been as wild or politically pointed as the monster in Ahmed Saadawi’s Frankenstein in Baghdad.” —Gregory Cowles, The New York Times

“Intense and surreal . . . Assured and hallucinatory . . . funny and horrifying in a near-perfect admixture . . . Saadawi blends the unearthly, the horrific and the mundane to terrific effect. . . . There’s a freshness to both his voice and vision. . . . What happened in Iraq was a spiritual disaster, and this brave and ingenious novel takes that idea and uncorks all its possible meanings.” —Dwight Garner, The New York Times
 
“Brilliant . . . Crisp, moving, and mordantly humorous . . . Like Catch-22 and Slaughterhouse-Five, Frankenstein in Baghdad plays the absurd normality of war for dark humor. . . . The monster is a powerful metaphor, but the real reason the novel works is because Saadawi writes with a rare combination of generosity, cruelty, and black humor. He has a journalist’s eye for detail and a cartoonist’s sense of satire.” —Roy Scranton, The New Republic

“[It] startles and stuns . . . Like the best science fiction, fantasy, and horror, Frankenstein in Baghdad . . . stretches the fabric of logic.” —The Atlantic

“Powerful . . . Surreal . . . Darkly humorous . . . Cleverly conscripts a macabre character from a venerable literary work in the service of a modern-day cautionary fable . . . An excellent English translation.” —Chicago Tribune

“A remarkable achievement, and one that, regrettably, is unlikely ever to lose its urgent relevancy . . . Surreal, visceral and mordant . . . An acute portrait of Middle Eastern sectarianism and geopolitical ineptitude, an absurdist morality fable, and a horror fantasy . . . Strange, violent, and wickedly funny.” —Sarah Perry, The Guardian

“Come for the fascinating plot; stay for the dark humor and devastating view of humanity.” —The Washington Post

“Fascinating . . . Strikes a feverish balance between fantasy and hard realism . . . The fabric of the city’s neighborhoods couldn’t be more sharply etched. . . . Saadawi . . . delivers a vision of his war-mangled city that’s hard to forget.” —The Seattle Times

“The [Frankenstein] conceit proves surprisingly apt. . . . Saadawi’s novel . . . 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 [and] offer[s] a glimpse into the day-to-day experiences of a society fractured by bloodshed.” —The Economist

“What do you get if you cross the spiritualism of Lincoln in the Bardo *with the sci-fi-cum-action-movie oomph of *The Terminator? Possibly something resembling Frankenstein in Baghdad. . . . It’s as much of a crossbreed as its ghoulish hero—part thriller, part horror, part social commentary. . . . Saadawi . . . captures the atmosphere of war-torn Baghdad with the swiftest of penstrokes, and picks out details that make the reader feel, and even taste, the aftermath of the explosions that pepper the book.” —**Financial Times

“Hallucinatory and hilarious . . . Surprising, even jo…