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• Frankenstein in Baghdad: A Novel
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• 21 June 2020
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REVIEW Frankenstein in Baghdad: A Novel FREE DOWNLOAD ↠ Frankenstein in Baghdad: A Novel SUMMARY ´ E-book, or Kindle E-pub ✓ Join or create book clubs Ng criminal who though shot cannot be killed Hadi soon realizes hes created a monster one that needs human flesh to survivefirst from the guilty and then from anyone in its path A prizewinning novel byBaghdads new literary starThe New York Times Frankenstein in Baghdad captures with white knuckle horror and black humor the surreal reality of contemporary Ir. This was an intriguing and imaginative book based around a very clever central premise although it never uite managed to deliver on all its potentialAmidst the mayhem of the post war period in Baghdad following the demise of Saddam Hussein and the initial attempts by the invading forces to establish a sustainable administration Hadi is roaming the streets finding parts of bodies He takes these home where he stitches them together compiling a composite corpse He recognises that this is bizarre even grotesue behaviour but sees his work as a form of commentary or protest on the butchery that surrounds him As the book opens he has just retrieved a nose which renders his work completeShortly afterwards while Hadi is away celebrating with friends Baghdad is subjected to an unusually fierce storm When Hadi returns home he finds that the composite corpse has gone Meanwhile a series of strange and increasingly horrific murders occur across the cityWhile the idea is diverting I found the pace of the book and the laboured characterisation very frustrating As always of course with works that I have read in translation I was left wondering whether the deficiencies were down to the writer s original work or a dislocation of tone arising from the translator s spin I am glad to have read it and wouldn t have done so if it had not been for the hype surrounding the book s nomination for this year s Man Booker International Prize but I suspect that that nomination might owe to motives of political correctness than to assessment of genuine literary merit

REVIEW Frankenstein in Baghdad: A Novel

REVIEW Frankenstein in Baghdad: A Novel FREE DOWNLOAD ↠ Frankenstein in Baghdad: A Novel SUMMARY ´ E-book, or Kindle E-pub ✓ Join or create book clubs Pied Baghdad Hadia scavenger and an oddball fixture at a local cafcollects 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 looki. I was really intrigued to read this and thought it had an absolutely amazing concept It does but then it doesn t really seem to know what to do with it It splits its POV through multiple characters seemingly mostly for the sake of taking up space It does a lot of interesting worldbuilding but then doesn t really fulfill its own promise

REVIEW Frankenstein in Baghdad: A Novel FREE DOWNLOAD ↠ Frankenstein in Baghdad: A Novel SUMMARY ´ E-book, or Kindle E-pub ✓ Join or create book clubs Man Booker International Prize finalistBrave and ingenious The New York TimesGripping darkly humorousprofound Phil Klay bestselling author and National Book Award winner for RedeploymentExtraordinaryA devastating but essential read Kevin Powers bestselling author and National Book Award finalist for The Yellow Birds From the rubble strewn streets of US occu. I have never given a 1 star rating until now But this is truly one of the worst books I have ever read and the reasons for this are numerous The author deserves this low rating for having wasted 8 hours of my lifeNote I only bought and read this book because it was my book club s pick for the month Even then I barely made it through the entire book I was honestly tempted on several occasions to abandon it completely it was that painful The first 50% is akin to plodding through mud mixed with molasses Numerous times I lost concentration and had to reread many sentences Like I said it was painful It somewhat picks up the pace in the second half but it is then that you notice how truly bad it is as the style and plot or lack thereof become noticeableFirstly the writing is beyond poor It has absolutely no soul It is flat simplistic with staccato like sentences This novel reads like an accountant s summary report than a novel Not being able to read it in the original Arab language I cannot say whether this is due to a poor translation or the author s actual lack of any writing talent But either way the phrasing is awkward almost on par with a Google Translate experience It is full of abrupt cuts and poor transitions As an example the protagonist enters a room in a brothel and in the next paragraph he exits the brothel no description no plot development Another example he is riding in a car with another character Nawal and in the next paragraph they are in a hotel cafeteria with no transition or explanation how they got thereSecondly and unforgivably the plot structure itself is a mess The story D R A G S in the beginning half then whisks by in the final 20% making you feel the author himself got bored with the whole mess or else was on a tight deadline to his publisher and just wanted or was forced to wind everything up asap In fact he was in such a hurry to wrap things up that he forgot all about the wooden panel that was found behind the Virgin statue at Hadi s place a plot point touched upon several times leading one to believe it was something of significance but I guess notThe author has no notion of time structure a thread of narrative rambles on into the future then in the next paragraphsection again without any transition jumps back to some previous pointThirdly there is zero character development I ve read books where robots had personality than any of the characters in this book And purely as an observation the only women in the book continue to perpetuate the female Arab stereotypes the stupid rambling old woman the whore the conniving yet guileless businesswoman whore Although to be fair the men are not much fleshed outThe I assume main character Mahmoud al Sawadi would appear to be the alter ego of the author Ahmed Saadawi Mahmoud being a derivation of Ahmed and Sawadi being almost an anagram of Saadawi and as such gets the most character development But even then he remains a bland unformed creature not much different at the end of the book from what he was at the beginningI totally fail to see how it won any let alone top awards The only even remotely plausible explanation I can think of is that someone had to have a token Arab work in their repertoire because there can be no other explanation