A massive car bomb goes off in front of a hotel in Baghdad, vaporizing the security guard at the front gate. The guard finds himself a soul without a body.

An old lady named Elishva has been waiting for her son to return from the war for years and years already. Nobody else thinks he’ll ever return, but Elishva refuses to give up hope. Some even believe that she, or the image of a saint on her wall, has magical powers.

Simultaneously, an old, alcoholic junk dealer, Hadi, a neighbor to Elishva, has been collecting and joining body parts around the city in order to give them a proper burial. When Hadi finishes the body, he comes to his senses, finding that what he has been doing might not be generally approved of. He decides to quietly get rid of the stitched-up body in his shack – but suddenly the body is gone. Soon, people around the city start dying after being attacked by someone who doesn’t seem to be affected by bullets.

So begins the Frankenstein in Baghdad by Ahmed Saadawi. 📚 The book is set in Baghdad in the first decade of the 2000s when American helicopters fly over constantly and getting questioned by any security organization is a serious risk of physical injury.

A quote on the cover describes the book as “horrifically funny”, but “fun” is not the primary attribute I’d attach to it. The book grimly exposes the ordinary life that those of us in the safer parts of the world can’t easily even imagine. Car bombs of various extremist groups go off so often that they barely make the news unless more than a handful of people die. The city is so accustomed to bombs that their aftermath is taken care of extremely efficiently: body parts are washed away and craters are filled up in mere hours so that normal life can continue.

In addition to the people I already mentioned above, the book follows a few others too. The most prominent of them is Mahmoud the reporter who interviews Hadi and publishes his story. Mahmoud doesn’t quite know whether to believe Hadi and doesn’t expect anyone to take his article seriously, but finds himself interrogated by a mysterious Tracking and Pursuit Department. The department, led by Brigadier Majid, successfully employs astrologers and fortune tellers in order to catch dangerous criminals.

In the end, many threads are left hanging, as if to ask, “what’s the point?”. It was a good enough read, still, and certainly something different. I found this one with the StoryGraph Reads the World challenge, like my previous read Anxious People.