A man finds something unspeakable, cloaks it a rag, brings it home.
He’s in Baghdad, after America has invaded. Bombs syncopate the city. Body parts are everywhere, unidentified, unburied.
If the man can stitch the parts into a body, he thinks, maybe the body will get a proper burial.
Then the body disappears.
In Ahmed Saadawi’s Frankenstein in Baghdad, newly translated into English, a monster rises to roam a ravaged city.
We follow a man into a bomb, we follow his soul as it is blasted away, and we watch the soul seep into the monster. “It didn’t have a soul, while he was a soul without a body.” This is how the monster rises.
First it kills the killers, a lumbering quilt of vengeance. But its body starts loosening, which requires replacement parts. PLEASE READ
Frankenstein in Baghdad by Ahmed Saadawi, translated by Jonathan Wright, from Penguin
