My rating: 3 of 5 stars
The War in Iraq was devastating to the people of that country, but there have been few books written about the war from their perspective, and even fewer of those books have been fictional. This book greatly rectifies that by riffing on one of the greatest books in the Western canon and using it as a vehicle to meditate on the senseless violence of the civil war that gripped the country in the mid-2000s.
The book starts not long after the the invasion of Iraq, around 2005 or so, and Baghdad is just beginning to sink into the sectarian violence that will grip it for several years. In the midst of this, an eccentric homeless man collects the body parts of different bombing victims and puts them together. Suddenly, the body comes to life, goes on a killing spree, and becomes the obsession of a local reporter, the general of a rogue Iraqi division, and the residents of the local district the monster inhabits.
If this all sounds exciting, just know, going into this book, it is not a super exciting book. While there are moments of high drama, this is not exactly some kind of horror-suspense novel. Rather, as I said above, this book is more of a meditation on the senseless violence that the invasion unleashed. The monster itself is more of a metaphor, though he does have a great chapter that he narrates in the middle of the book.
Honestly, it was not the book I was expecting when I picked it up, but that does not mean that it is a bad book. Indeed, this is a book that I am going to have to revisit in the near future as my stuttered reading of it probably did not lend itself to the best reading experience. All I can say is that, after reading this book, I am still fascinated by its premise and I feel like I have to read it again in the near future.
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