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Frankenstein in Baghdad: A Novel
International Booker Prize finalist
Winner of the International Prize for Arabic Fiction
“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.
Winner of the International Prize for Arabic Fiction
“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.
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Community Reviews
This novel is not only a clever reimagining of Frankenstein in a very different cultural context but an astute commentary on cyclical and sectarian violence. In the form of the Whatitsname, a creature composed of body parts from many different individuals, Saadawi demonstrates the difficulty of separating the criminals from the innocents in a warzone and the way that violence only perpetuates more violence. I think Saadawi was brilliant in using a staple of Western culture to hook readers from a non-Arabic background. The way he blends realism with myth and fantasy is reminiscent of Gabriel García Márquez. I also appreciate the varied backgrounds that Saadawi gives the characters: Assyrian Christian, Muslim, ex-Ba'athist, military, political and social opportunists etc. This book definitely holds up in a second reading.
As the Goodreads reviewer John Burton pointed out, Mary Shelley grew up in the shadow of the French Revolutionary and Napoleonic Wars, the bloodiest series of wars in Europe since the Thirty Years War of the 17th Century. This series of wars would be the bloodiest wars in Europe until World War I and World War II of the 20th Century. Burton believes that the story of Frankenstein is, in some ways, a response to the Napoleonic Wars (Rapport 1). The connection between the story of Frankenstein and war is more overt in the novel Frankenstein in Baghdad by the Iraqi Author Ahmed Saadawi. The book was translated from Arabic by Jonathan Wright. The novel was originally published in Arabic in 2013. The translation by Wright was published in 2018. The novel is set mainly in Bagdad, and all the action is set during the Iraq War of the 2000s. The Associated Press estimates that around 110,600 Iraqis had died of violent deaths as of April 2009. The Associated Press acknowledges that this statistic is a conservative figure. Many more Iraqis have died since April 2009. In Saadawi’s novel, the monster represents the violence of Iraq. The monster is also connected to the previous wars that Iraq has fought in. An old, confused widow named Elishiva thinks the monster is her son, who went missing during the Iran-Iraq War. Saadawi’s story was probably inspired by real stories, such as the story of the Iraqi Comedian Ahmed Albasheer, who, along with his siblings, pieced together his brother’s body so that his mother would have a body to bury (56:58 minutes to 58:27 minutes) (Bluemel 2020). Saadawi and Wright's novel Frankenstein in Baghdad is a powerful novel about the cycle and self-righteousness of violence. I want to thank John Burton for his help while I was writing this ‘review.’
Works Cited:
Bluemel, Jason, director. Once Upon A Time in Iraq. Boston, Massachusetts: WGBH. 2020. Once Upon A Time In Iraq | FRONTLINE (pbs.org)
National Broadcast Corporation (NBC). 2009, April 29. “Report: 110,600 Iraqis killed since the invasion.” NBC News. Report: 110,600 Iraqis killed since invasion (nbcnews.com)
Rapport, Mike. 2013. Napoleonic Wars: A Very Short Introduction. Oxford, United Kingdom: Oxford University Press. Kindle.
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