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justbeatrice 's review for:
The Corpse Washer
by Sinan Antoon
If the Middle East is misunderstood in general, maybe there is a country paying the highest price of all in terms of external ignorance and general lack of interest: Iraq.
In The Corpse Washer - a self-translated novel by Iraqi-American poet, professor, and author Sinan Antoon, the writer takes us into a world that rarely reaches us: the everyday life or ordinary people bearing with something as heavy, haunting and mastodontic as the Iraqi history in the span of three wars - the war with Iran, the Gulf War and the 2003 war. Just the fact history is counted in wars, tells of an aching epopeya.
Jawad comes from a Shiite family of corpse washers and shrouders of Baghdad, but he dreams of arts and chooses to go to the University to become a sculptor. Arts never die and, while Iraq crumbles under the weight of wars, sanctions, unscrupulous politics, Jawad can tend and create beauty. The outside world, though, is a show of violence and chaos where corpses simply lay and pile up, leaving no alternative to Jawad than to return to the family business.
Iraq can be no country for aesthetics seems to be the message and when Jawad tries to leave for good, at the border with Jordan he is sent back to Baghdad, to his destiny.
The Corpse Washer, despite the general sadness, the heaviness of the socio-political-religious context, delivers unexpected sublime images and words of poetry that perhaps only an Iraqi writer could capture.
A must read.
In The Corpse Washer - a self-translated novel by Iraqi-American poet, professor, and author Sinan Antoon, the writer takes us into a world that rarely reaches us: the everyday life or ordinary people bearing with something as heavy, haunting and mastodontic as the Iraqi history in the span of three wars - the war with Iran, the Gulf War and the 2003 war. Just the fact history is counted in wars, tells of an aching epopeya.
Jawad comes from a Shiite family of corpse washers and shrouders of Baghdad, but he dreams of arts and chooses to go to the University to become a sculptor. Arts never die and, while Iraq crumbles under the weight of wars, sanctions, unscrupulous politics, Jawad can tend and create beauty. The outside world, though, is a show of violence and chaos where corpses simply lay and pile up, leaving no alternative to Jawad than to return to the family business.
Iraq can be no country for aesthetics seems to be the message and when Jawad tries to leave for good, at the border with Jordan he is sent back to Baghdad, to his destiny.
The Corpse Washer, despite the general sadness, the heaviness of the socio-political-religious context, delivers unexpected sublime images and words of poetry that perhaps only an Iraqi writer could capture.
A must read.