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mme_carton's review against another edition
challenging
dark
emotional
hopeful
mysterious
reflective
tense
medium-paced
- Plot- or character-driven? Character
- Strong character development? It's complicated
- Loveable characters? It's complicated
- Diverse cast of characters? Yes
- Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes
4.0
Content Warnings
Graphic: Ableism, Alcoholism, Body horror, Child death, Death, Gore, Gun violence, Misogyny, Physical abuse, Sexism, Sexual assault, Sexual content, Torture, Toxic relationship, Violence, Blood, Police brutality, Medical content, Grief, Mass/school shootings, Religious bigotry, Death of parent, Murder, Toxic friendship, Alcohol, War, and Injury/Injury detail
Moderate: Cursing and Fire/Fire injury
Minor: Animal cruelty
books_n_pickles's review against another edition
dark
emotional
reflective
slow-paced
- Plot- or character-driven? Character
- Strong character development? It's complicated
- Loveable characters? No
- Diverse cast of characters? Yes
- Flaws of characters a main focus? It's complicated
4.5
First off, know that this is not a straight-up <i>Frankenstein</i> retelling. It's not sci-fi lite: rather, Saadawi took the idea of Frankenstein's creation, and pulls a ship of Theseus with it--which is highly fitting, as you'll see in my spoiler-y description.
Saadawi has a lot of characters on the board here, and the book includes a handy list of them at the front to help you keep track. I absolutely love books chock-full of memorable characters, and Saadawi definitely delivers.
Like Mary Shelley, Saadawi structures his story in layers. We begin with a top-secret notice about this book and the activities of a government organization known as the Pursuit and Tracking Division. Apparently the division should be disbanded, the story destroyed, and the author <i>re</i>arrested. We hear the story itself as assembled by the nameless author, who is building on the work of disgraced young journalist Mahmoud al-Sawadi, who heard the story from a charismatic junk dealer.
I'm about to write a description that will refresh my memory in the future; pieces of the story not learned until late in the book will be included. Quit while you're ahead if you don't want the story to be spoiled.
Junk dealer Hadi is dismayed to discover, while identifying the remains of a friend, that when a person is killed by a blast from a bomb, not every piece of every body is retrieved. He decides that in addition to junk for resale, he will gather abandoned pieces of people, assembling them into a single body that may be given a proper burial.
What he does not expect his that his next door neighbor, a very old Christian woman named Elishva, will see in the body the miracle that she has begged from Saint George for years: the return of her beloved son Daniel, who was disappeared years earlier. She calls to this creation just as the spirit of a man freshly killed in a suicide attack finds the soulless body, and between Hadi's work and her call, the creature comes to life. Okay, so he doesn't look much like Daniel, but Elishva knows better than to question a miracle.
But he does not stay to comfort the woman in her old age. Instead, he is compelled to enact revenge on those who murdered the people whose components make up his body. Garrulous Hadi shares his insider knowledge of the murderer striking the city seemingly at random, though of course it's too wild a tale for any visitors to the local coffee shop to believe...except for Mahmoud, who convinces Hadi to take a recorder to Daniel so that he can tell his own story.
And what a story! Unlike Shelley's creation, Daniel has accumulated followers and factions, who see him as the ultimate Iraqi, a herald of a savior, and a savior himself. He also has a serious problem: if he kills someone or takes too long to do so, the part of his body associated with that victim starts to decay, and requires replacement. As he and his advisors try to decide how to handle this revelation, he begins to question just what makes someone a victim or a perpetrator in the first place.
The title of Mahmoud's expose based on Daniel's confessions gives its name to the title of the book. The article attracts the attention of the shady Pursuit and Tracking Division, which employs seers to identify threats both real and supernatural so that the government can thwart them or use them. The head of the division sees the capture of Daniel as his ticket to a cushier job, but his seers have very different opinions of what they should do when they locate the murderer.
Quite outside of Daniel's influence, several characters find their established ways of living coming apart at the seams. We come full circle back to the nameless author mentioned in the opening report, who takes over the story that Mahmoud abandons, only to come to the attention of the Pursuit and Tracking Division.
If that sounds like a lot, it is. The sprawling, diverse cast of characters includes Algerian immigrants, an Armenian family, country folks drawn to the city for opportunity, and city folks driven to the countryside and out of the country altogether for fear of their physical and political safety. Shady real estate dealers and suave editors rub elbows with good-hearted coffee shop owners, failing hoteliers, and exhausted priests; Christian families live in formerly Jewish mansions while old Baghdad families support and envy each other in turns; American forces barrel through the neighborhood with impunity; and independent female artists get lost in this male-dominated story. It's quite a collection, displaying a cross-section of a rich city slowly being destroyed by bombs, gangs, meddling foreigners, revenge, and greed.
What a book! I feel bad that it was probably only my emotional state at the time I read this that kept me from enjoying it fully. It's hard to convey more than the plot, because a major strength of this book was Saadawi's ability to build small scenes that help build human characters with unrealized emotional depth (as when a real estate broker full of confidence and bluster becomes a terrified shadow of himself in the face of unpredictable American soldiers) or make you realize that even a journalist main character isn't as reliable as you thought (as when Mahmoud finally meets the woman he's been fantasizing about for months and swings, on no evidence, from seeing her as a whore to an ideal to a slut to a victim of unwanted attention to an opportunist to an object of his own unwanted attention). There's a lot to the plot, but it's these small scenes and their fascinating characters, and the universal humanity of big questions in what may appear to be simple situations, that make <i>Frankenstein in Baghdad</i> a standout.
<b>Quotes</b>
<i>(I had a ton, but I winnowed them down. I'm not totally sure why I settled on only these two:</i>
p. 60) <i>Elishva promises God that if something bad happens to the man who betrayed her son, she will (do something special that I forgot because I'm reviewing this book after reading two others) in his honor.</i>
Having adopted many of the customs of the neighborhood, Elishva saw it as a vow she was now fulfilling, although Father Josiah always corrected her.
"We don't set conditions for the Lord, as Muslims do," he would say. "We don't say, 'If You do this, then I'll do that."
Elishva knew what he meant, of course, but she saw no harm in setting conditions for God, as Umm Salim and her other Muslim neighbors did. She didn't see the Lord in quite the same way as Father Josiah did. The Lord wasn't "in the highest"; she didn't see him as domineering or tyrannical. He was just an old friend, and it would be hard to abandon that friendship.
p. 123) <i>A debate occurs on a talk show about who is responsible for instigating a mass panic and subsequent deaths in Baghdad.</i>
"Honestly, I think everyone was responsible in one way or another. I'd go further and say that all the security incidents and the tragedies we're seeing stem from one thing--fear. The people on the bridge died because they were frightened of dying. Every day we're dying from the same fear of dying. The groups that have given shelter and support to al-Qaeda have done so because they are frightened of another group, and this other group has created and mobilized militias to protect itself from al-Qaeda. It has created a death machine working in the other direction because it's afraid of the Other. And we're going to see more and more death because of fear. The government and the occupation forces have to eliminate fear. They must put a stop to it if they really want this cycle of killing to end."
Saadawi has a lot of characters on the board here, and the book includes a handy list of them at the front to help you keep track. I absolutely love books chock-full of memorable characters, and Saadawi definitely delivers.
Like Mary Shelley, Saadawi structures his story in layers. We begin with a top-secret notice about this book and the activities of a government organization known as the Pursuit and Tracking Division. Apparently the division should be disbanded, the story destroyed, and the author <i>re</i>arrested. We hear the story itself as assembled by the nameless author, who is building on the work of disgraced young journalist Mahmoud al-Sawadi, who heard the story from a charismatic junk dealer.
I'm about to write a description that will refresh my memory in the future; pieces of the story not learned until late in the book will be included. Quit while you're ahead if you don't want the story to be spoiled.
Junk dealer Hadi is dismayed to discover, while identifying the remains of a friend, that when a person is killed by a blast from a bomb, not every piece of every body is retrieved. He decides that in addition to junk for resale, he will gather abandoned pieces of people, assembling them into a single body that may be given a proper burial.
What he does not expect his that his next door neighbor, a very old Christian woman named Elishva, will see in the body the miracle that she has begged from Saint George for years: the return of her beloved son Daniel, who was disappeared years earlier. She calls to this creation just as the spirit of a man freshly killed in a suicide attack finds the soulless body, and between Hadi's work and her call, the creature comes to life. Okay, so he doesn't look much like Daniel, but Elishva knows better than to question a miracle.
But he does not stay to comfort the woman in her old age. Instead, he is compelled to enact revenge on those who murdered the people whose components make up his body. Garrulous Hadi shares his insider knowledge of the murderer striking the city seemingly at random, though of course it's too wild a tale for any visitors to the local coffee shop to believe...except for Mahmoud, who convinces Hadi to take a recorder to Daniel so that he can tell his own story.
And what a story! Unlike Shelley's creation, Daniel has accumulated followers and factions, who see him as the ultimate Iraqi, a herald of a savior, and a savior himself. He also has a serious problem: if he kills someone or takes too long to do so, the part of his body associated with that victim starts to decay, and requires replacement. As he and his advisors try to decide how to handle this revelation, he begins to question just what makes someone a victim or a perpetrator in the first place.
The title of Mahmoud's expose based on Daniel's confessions gives its name to the title of the book. The article attracts the attention of the shady Pursuit and Tracking Division, which employs seers to identify threats both real and supernatural so that the government can thwart them or use them. The head of the division sees the capture of Daniel as his ticket to a cushier job, but his seers have very different opinions of what they should do when they locate the murderer.
Quite outside of Daniel's influence, several characters find their established ways of living coming apart at the seams. We come full circle back to the nameless author mentioned in the opening report, who takes over the story that Mahmoud abandons, only to come to the attention of the Pursuit and Tracking Division.
If that sounds like a lot, it is. The sprawling, diverse cast of characters includes Algerian immigrants, an Armenian family, country folks drawn to the city for opportunity, and city folks driven to the countryside and out of the country altogether for fear of their physical and political safety. Shady real estate dealers and suave editors rub elbows with good-hearted coffee shop owners, failing hoteliers, and exhausted priests; Christian families live in formerly Jewish mansions while old Baghdad families support and envy each other in turns; American forces barrel through the neighborhood with impunity; and independent female artists get lost in this male-dominated story. It's quite a collection, displaying a cross-section of a rich city slowly being destroyed by bombs, gangs, meddling foreigners, revenge, and greed.
What a book! I feel bad that it was probably only my emotional state at the time I read this that kept me from enjoying it fully. It's hard to convey more than the plot, because a major strength of this book was Saadawi's ability to build small scenes that help build human characters with unrealized emotional depth (as when a real estate broker full of confidence and bluster becomes a terrified shadow of himself in the face of unpredictable American soldiers) or make you realize that even a journalist main character isn't as reliable as you thought (as when Mahmoud finally meets the woman he's been fantasizing about for months and swings, on no evidence, from seeing her as a whore to an ideal to a slut to a victim of unwanted attention to an opportunist to an object of his own unwanted attention). There's a lot to the plot, but it's these small scenes and their fascinating characters, and the universal humanity of big questions in what may appear to be simple situations, that make <i>Frankenstein in Baghdad</i> a standout.
<b>Quotes</b>
<i>(I had a ton, but I winnowed them down. I'm not totally sure why I settled on only these two:</i>
p. 60) <i>Elishva promises God that if something bad happens to the man who betrayed her son, she will (do something special that I forgot because I'm reviewing this book after reading two others) in his honor.</i>
Having adopted many of the customs of the neighborhood, Elishva saw it as a vow she was now fulfilling, although Father Josiah always corrected her.
"We don't set conditions for the Lord, as Muslims do," he would say. "We don't say, 'If You do this, then I'll do that."
Elishva knew what he meant, of course, but she saw no harm in setting conditions for God, as Umm Salim and her other Muslim neighbors did. She didn't see the Lord in quite the same way as Father Josiah did. The Lord wasn't "in the highest"; she didn't see him as domineering or tyrannical. He was just an old friend, and it would be hard to abandon that friendship.
p. 123) <i>A debate occurs on a talk show about who is responsible for instigating a mass panic and subsequent deaths in Baghdad.</i>
"Honestly, I think everyone was responsible in one way or another. I'd go further and say that all the security incidents and the tragedies we're seeing stem from one thing--fear. The people on the bridge died because they were frightened of dying. Every day we're dying from the same fear of dying. The groups that have given shelter and support to al-Qaeda have done so because they are frightened of another group, and this other group has created and mobilized militias to protect itself from al-Qaeda. It has created a death machine working in the other direction because it's afraid of the Other. And we're going to see more and more death because of fear. The government and the occupation forces have to eliminate fear. They must put a stop to it if they really want this cycle of killing to end."
Content Warnings
Graphic: Body horror, Sexism, and Violence
arwydionn's review against another edition
challenging
dark
mysterious
tense
fast-paced
- Plot- or character-driven? Character
- Strong character development? Yes
- Loveable characters? It's complicated
- Diverse cast of characters? Yes
- Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes
4.0
Content Warnings
Graphic: Gore, Violence, Blood, Murder, and War
Minor: Sexism
plumadeqam's review against another edition
adventurous
medium-paced
- Strong character development? It's complicated
- Loveable characters? No
- Diverse cast of characters? It's complicated
- Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes
3.0
Content Warnings
Graphic: Death, Sexism, and Violence
Moderate: Police brutality