Frankenstein in Baghdad: A Novel
By: Ahmed Saadawi / Narrated By: Edoardo Ballerini, Kaleo Griffith
Length: 8 hrs and 1 min
Join me in this review wherein I decide whether or not I liked this audiobook…
Seriously.
It’s like this, see. When I first started listening to Frankenstein in Baghdad, I was lolling in bed, and my husband came in the room, asked me what I was listening to, and I replied that I was hearing Sheer Genius. Lolling still, husband back in room and asking (Cuz men never listen to you) again, and I responded: Total Mess. Lolling, cuz I’m perpetually lolling whilst listening, husband back yet again, asking YET AGAIN (Seriously! Men! I tell ya!), and the reply was: Dunno, Jury’s Totally Out On This One.
So I just came back from a walk where I spent the time mulling it all over. And lemme just go from what it was to where I am.
Iraq, post-Invasion by America, sectarian strife, IEDs blowing the Iraqi world apart on a daily basis. Hadi, a junk collector/seller, is sickened by it all. After coming soooo close to an explosion that shoulda meant his death, he numbs out. But not before he starts picking up body parts, parts of people who will have no justice, trying to piece together a single corpse so that he can leave it out where it might be noticed by the Americans, might notice that this corpse was once a person. He stitches it up, leaves it for a bit, and comes back to it only to discover it’s gotten up and left.
A woman whose son went missing after being conscripted to fight in the earlier Iran/Iraq war has lived the moment of his leaving, the time since his disappearance, living in perpetual hold, not giving up hope, completely without closure. Her daughters up and left the country when it became obvious Iraq had gone to hell in a hand basket, and they call her weekly to try to get her to leave also. But the woman canNOT leave without her son, Daniel.
Lo and behold, “Daniel” shows up—it’s the stitched up monster. And he uses her home as a base for what he shall spend the book doing: Killing those who have blood on their hands, those responsible for each bit of body, each part of his newly animated corpse. As there is only fear, and no justice, in Iraq, he soon grows a band of followers who eagerly rush to provide him with new body parts, pieces of victims who are purely innocent. Until they’re not. -OR- could it be that everyone is guilty of something, responsible for SOMEthing ill-conceived?
Interspersed with this is a TOTAL jumping around of characters, but the other MAIN one is a journalist named Mahmoud. He spends time hobnobbing with the man who runs the magazine he works for, a man who Knows People, is unruffled by the atrocities that are occurring.
So does it work?
First, the character-hopping leaves the listener in near-total confusion and with the sense that author Ahmed Saadawi doesn’t really care about structure (My apologies to author if indeed he does care, but DUDE!). Also, there are nuuuumerous times Saadawi definitely describes some thing(s) that go absolutely nowhere: Why on earth does he keep mentioning a hole in somebody’s wall if it means nothing? He does it a LOT. So that’s aggravating.
Still, he describes bloodshed and mayhem in SUCH a detailed manner that one is moved to anger, to near tears. Even if Bush/Cheney look like Moderates compared to what we got from 2016-2020, ya gotta admit: It was an atrocity. Saadawi chronicles a day-to-day Iraqi life with all its electricity outages, with the numbness a person might feel for yet another human being being near-vaporized in a spray of blood and gore, to so many near misses, so many times a person COULD have been killed had they not stayed to ask a question, chosen to walk a different street on a mere whim.
Plus, this is a DARKLY funny novel. I wound up smiling and chortling and wondering how on earth I was doing so. I mean, when the Powers That Be round up ugly men and take them for brutal interrogation cuz ugliness cooooould be taken for monstrous stitching? Gosh, I hate it, but I DID smile wryly.
Top this all off with Edoardo Ballerini’s near flawless narration, and I’ve gotta give Frankenstein in Baghdad a Yea when all is said and done. What can I say about Ballerini that I have NOT said before: The man rocks!
Not without misgivings do I hand out my Affirmative for this story, but it’s merciless and poignant even as it wallows in the horror.
There. Review done. Verdict In.
Off to tell m’ danged husband, and I’m sure he STILL won’t be listening…
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