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matildazq 's review for:
Frankenstein in Baghdad
by Ahmed Saadawi
This was fairly challenging for me to get into. I may have cried a little bit when I started it at 2 am and realized it had a dramatis personae.
However, somewhere around 3 or 4 chapters in, my attention was able to snap into the right kind of focus. It's not plot-driven, and even to the extent that it's character driven, each chapter (or section within a chapter) "refreshes" the relationships, preoccupations, and so on of the focal character. Moreover, what's "true" (or perhaps the "correct" way to view a particular situation) shifts as the linear story pivots from character to character, and the timeline loops back on itself and jumps ahead. So, despite the dramatis personae suggesting Tolstoy, approaching it like Camus or Kafka was the key, for me at least.
I wonder, though, if that's a distancing mechanism as a reader. The lives of the characters are filled with tragedies and there's new violence lurking around literally every corner, all of which turns the the monster (who both is and is not the monster, as in Mary Shelley's novel) into a perpetual motion machine.
I found the introduction of The Writer at the eleventh hour a bit off-putting. Certainly, it's central to the novel to convey that there really is no end in sight for any of the characters, and there's no place for truth to come to rest in the occupied city, but it also felt like a clunky mechanic because the book had to end somehow.
However, somewhere around 3 or 4 chapters in, my attention was able to snap into the right kind of focus. It's not plot-driven, and even to the extent that it's character driven, each chapter (or section within a chapter) "refreshes" the relationships, preoccupations, and so on of the focal character. Moreover, what's "true" (or perhaps the "correct" way to view a particular situation) shifts as the linear story pivots from character to character, and the timeline loops back on itself and jumps ahead. So, despite the dramatis personae suggesting Tolstoy, approaching it like Camus or Kafka was the key, for me at least.
I wonder, though, if that's a distancing mechanism as a reader. The lives of the characters are filled with tragedies and there's new violence lurking around literally every corner, all of which turns the the monster (who both is and is not the monster, as in Mary Shelley's novel) into a perpetual motion machine.
I found the introduction of The Writer at the eleventh hour a bit off-putting. Certainly, it's central to the novel to convey that there really is no end in sight for any of the characters, and there's no place for truth to come to rest in the occupied city, but it also felt like a clunky mechanic because the book had to end somehow.