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A review by scottishben
The Corpse Exhibition: And Other Stories of Iraq by Hassan Blasim
3.0
Much of the buzz around this book appears to be as a book to read alongside Redeployment as being a short story collection covering the other side of the Iraq war and modern life in Iraq. Though I haven't read the Redeployment collection from what I have read about it these feel like very different beasts.
I sometimes get a bit annoyed at the mainstream and foreign/translated short fiction that seems to get overlooked by the SF community and Blasim is a good example of that. What his stories offer is familiar enough to genre fans but so different and fresh compared to much of what appears in standard short fiction markets which are full of "well written" but ultimately unimaginative and fiction that is either purposeless or shallow.
Few story collections have a 100% hit rate but I found the degree to which these stories or sections in the stories worked and didnt work was more varied than with other collections. There was not a single story that I completely loved and I think I am not a massive fan of Blasim's writing at least as it is represented in this translation but the ideas and execution led to some very memorable short strange and fantastical fiction that leaves much western short fiction as unimaginative, tame and bland.
I am not sure what I make of the title story for instance but it has kept returning to my mind time and time again after me reading the story. I can see myself rereading many of these stories and even if it is not all to my tastes I am getting something fresh here and am glad of that.
I sometimes get a bit annoyed at the mainstream and foreign/translated short fiction that seems to get overlooked by the SF community and Blasim is a good example of that. What his stories offer is familiar enough to genre fans but so different and fresh compared to much of what appears in standard short fiction markets which are full of "well written" but ultimately unimaginative and fiction that is either purposeless or shallow.
Few story collections have a 100% hit rate but I found the degree to which these stories or sections in the stories worked and didnt work was more varied than with other collections. There was not a single story that I completely loved and I think I am not a massive fan of Blasim's writing at least as it is represented in this translation but the ideas and execution led to some very memorable short strange and fantastical fiction that leaves much western short fiction as unimaginative, tame and bland.
I am not sure what I make of the title story for instance but it has kept returning to my mind time and time again after me reading the story. I can see myself rereading many of these stories and even if it is not all to my tastes I am getting something fresh here and am glad of that.