Hassan Blasim - The Corpse Exhibition: And Other Stories of Iraq (Penguin, 2014).

Mobi seems to be retail quality; epub is a good calibre conversion.


Heard this guy interviewed on BBC World Service last night -- fascinating and disturbing interview. So I tracked down this book. Looks like great stuff. Enjoy!


description:

A blistering debut that does for the Iraqi perspective on the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan what Phil Klay's Redeployment does for the American perspective.

The first major literary work about the Iraq War from an Iraqi perspective - by an explosive new voice hailed as "perhaps the best writer of Arabic fiction alive" (The Guardian) - The Corpse Exhibition shows us the war as we have never seen it before. Here is a world not only of soldiers and assassins, hostages and car bombers, refugees and terrorists, but also of madmen and prophets, angels and djinni, sorcerers and spirits.

Blending shocking realism with flights of fantasy, The Corpse Exhibition offers us a pageant of horrors, as haunting as the photos of Abu Ghraib and as difficult to look away from, but shot through with a gallows humor that yields an unflinching comedy of the macabre. Gripping and hallucinatory, this is a new kind of storytelling forged in the crucible of war.

From Booklist:

These 14 surrealistic stories are all about Iraq's endless wars. Americans are mostly off-stage, but "The Madman of Freedom Square" is a sly, dark allegory of their arrival and sometimes miraculous effect. Many characters are terrorists, as in "The Killers and the Compass," in which a veteran terrorist explains the divinity one acquires in the disposition of extreme violence - not a Muslim divinity but a personal one rising from inspiring terror and killing. The title story is all about the fine art of displaying corpses in public places. The matter-of-fact tone of its first-person narrator, a sort of instructor, suggests Kafka's "A Report to an Academy." But one thinks of Borges in perhaps the best entry, "The Nightmares of Carlos Fuentes," about an Iraqi immigrant to Holland who's determined to put his country's evils behind him, even to the point that he pretends to be Mexican. An interesting choice for larger fiction collections and perhaps base libraries.

Review

"Perhaps the greatest writer of Arabic fiction alive . . . [His stories are] crisp and shocking . . . cruel, funny and unsettling [with] hooks and twists that will lodge in any mind." - The Guardian

"Arresting, auspicious . . . Well-plotted, blackly comic . . . Sharp, tragicomic moments . . . persist in memory. . . . Its opening story [features] a terrorist middle manager who wouldn't be out of place in one of George Saunders's workplace nightmares. . . . 'The Song of the Goats' [is] a cunning gem. . . . If a short story could break the heart of a rock, this might just be the one. . . . The collection's last story is so complicatedly good [with] an ending worthy of Rod Serling. Mr. Blasim's stories owe more than a little of their dream logic to [Carlos] Fuentes and Serling, with maybe some Julio Cortazar thrown in. . . . Their sequence imparts a mounting novelistic power." - The New York Times

"Brilliant and disturbing . . . Bitter, furious and unforgettable, the stories seem to have been carved out of the country’s suppurating history like pieces of ragged flesh." - The Wall Street Journal

"A blunt and gruesome look at the Iraq War from the perspective of Iraqi citizens . . . Blasim's stories give shape to an absurdist world in which brutal violence is commonplace. . . . [For] fans of Roberto Bolano, Junot Diaz, and other writers who employ magical realism when describing grim realities." - The Huffington Post