A review by bluejayreads
Frankenstein in Baghdad by Ahmed Saadawi

dark mysterious medium-paced
  • Plot- or character-driven? Character
  • Strong character development? It's complicated
  • Loveable characters? It's complicated

4.0

I picked this up because I was intrigued by the concept of taking the “man made of parts from multiple people” idea and setting it in early-2000s Iraq. Plus it was written by an Iraqi author who lived in Baghdad in the early aughts, which is always a benefit for authenticity. 

The back cover makes it sound like Hadi is the main character, but he’s really not. There isn’t really a “main character” in this book, just a series of minor protagonists alternating perspectives to weave a story that feels less like a Structured Plot and more like part of real life. (The same thing is true of Celestial Bodies, so I’m beginning to wonder if Middle Eastern novels just have a very different structure from Western novels.) 

The main players in this story are as follows: 

  • Hadi, who makes a living buying junk, fixing it up, and selling it, and who collected pieces of people blown up in car bombings and sewed them into a single corpse.
  • An elderly lady who lives next door to Hadi and who refuses to sell her house and emigrate with her daughters because she still believes her son will come home.
  • A reporter who desperately wants to be like his powerful, wealthy, connected, asshole editor and reports on the reanimated corpse roaming Baghdad.
  • The monster himself, who has the opportunity to tell his story in his own words.
 
The monster’s story is almost entirely told as audio that the monster recorded onto an audio recorder and gave to the journalist, and that takes up a large chunk of the middle of the book. Beyond that, most of his story is told through other people seeing or hearing about his actions. The reporter has the most page time by far, but that makes sense since he is the most connected and in the best position to get the most parts of the story.
 
Each of the main protagonists in the story could be a complete character-focused story on their own.
 
  • Hadi is suffering from a past tragedy and trying to hide the dubiously-legal steps he’s taking to deal with it, the emotional toll leaving him struggling to work even though he’s running out of money. 
  • The elderly lady refuses to move out of her dangerous neighborhood to live with her daughters because the picture of Saint George she has on her wall has told her that her son, who never returned from the war two decades ago, will soon come home.
  • The journalist has been taken under the wing of the editor of his magazine, and desperately wants to be like him – whether that means cozying up to people he hates or abandoning his friends to get ahead.
  • The monster doesn’t know why he’s alive but he knows he has a mission, and undertaking that mission has brought him many disciples with different opinions of how the mission should be done and what the monster’s ultimate purpose is.
 
In a lot of ways it feels like several smaller stories based around the protagonists’ character arcs were put into a single volume and somehow wove together to form a bigger picture of tumultuous early-aughts Iraq and a Frankenstein’s monster loosed on the streets of Baghdad. It’s like some sort of artwork in multiple pieces, where every piece is a complete image in and of itself but when you put them together it forms another, bigger image.
 
Frankenstein in Baghdad is a well-told story, I’m very impressed with how it weaves together multiple character-focused stories to form another complete story, it has a lot of commentary about early-aughts Iraq that I think I would find more meaningful if I had been aware of world news in the early aughts, and it did keep me interested enough to read the whole book. I’m not entirely sure what to make of it when it comes to entertainment, but it was creative and engaging enough – and regardless of my personal opinion, I think it does have objective literary merit.
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