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A review by nonoemi
The Corpse Exhibition: And Other Stories of Iraq by Hassan Blasim
4.0
Reading the Corpse Exhibition is a bit like looking at deep space photographs of Jupiter: you see the swirling clouds, it gives the place color, a shape, a character--something harsh, terrible, and beautiful--but no matter how long you look, you're understanding is arrested by that surface level, because it's already beyond your comprehension. What lies beneath that extraterrestrial layer of impenetrable gas, as what lies within the pages of the Corpse exhibition, is at once a mystery and also immediately knowable because of that surface layer. The Iraq of The Corpse Exhibition is a harsh place, an unreal place, a disaster made poetical by Blasim's writing.
The Corpse Exhibition is both real and surreal. It's reminiscent of Kafka's The Trial in the sense that in reading it you get the impression that no matter how magical or metaphorical Blasim's writing becomes, that if there isn't a place in the world where Jinn wait stranded in the empty spaces beneath streets blown through by bombs and feast on the dead bodies of ancient Russian soldiers, if there isn't a place where secret organizations plot assassinations for artfulness and originality, if there isn't a place where an army of dead soldiers write their stories in beautiful, unequaled prose by the thousands and send those stories to a corrupt minister of culture who stores the stories in rented grain silos and passes them off as his own, then you get the feeling that such a place COULD exist, or has existed, or will exist.
Blasim's vision of his home country, from which he escaped in 2004, is bleak, terrifying and magical. The Corpse Exhibition should be required reading for anyone looking to see into the heart of what war after war can do to the soul of a place and its people.
The Corpse Exhibition is both real and surreal. It's reminiscent of Kafka's The Trial in the sense that in reading it you get the impression that no matter how magical or metaphorical Blasim's writing becomes, that if there isn't a place in the world where Jinn wait stranded in the empty spaces beneath streets blown through by bombs and feast on the dead bodies of ancient Russian soldiers, if there isn't a place where secret organizations plot assassinations for artfulness and originality, if there isn't a place where an army of dead soldiers write their stories in beautiful, unequaled prose by the thousands and send those stories to a corrupt minister of culture who stores the stories in rented grain silos and passes them off as his own, then you get the feeling that such a place COULD exist, or has existed, or will exist.
Blasim's vision of his home country, from which he escaped in 2004, is bleak, terrifying and magical. The Corpse Exhibition should be required reading for anyone looking to see into the heart of what war after war can do to the soul of a place and its people.