Frankenstein in Baghdad begins with an explosion in Baghdad’s Tayaran Square, the full significance of which doesn’t become clear until later, when the junk dealer Hadi tells his story to a group of journalists at a coffee shop. One, a German documentary-maker, leaves halfway through, laughing off Hadi’s tale as a fable stolen from a Robert De Niro movie. But Mahmoud al-Sawadi, an Iraqi magazine journalist, stays and listens closely, because what Hadi’s telling him is genuinely weird, even for Baghdad: how after the explosion he’d picked up someone’s nose off the street and sewed it onto the face of a corpse he’d been building in his shed. Then how, while he was sleeping, the corpse apparently got up and walked away.

FRANKENSTEIN IN BAGHDAD: A NOVEL by Ahmed Saadawi Penguin Books, 287 pp., $16.00

Hadi’s a well-known liar, and a drunk to boot, but as Mahmoud discovers, this time the junk man was telling the truth. His story sparks the plot of Ahmed Saadawi’s brilliant, rueful novel, which won the 2014 International Prize for Arabic Fiction and has recently appeared in a crisp, moving, and mordantly humorous English translation from Jonathan Wright and Penguin Books. Hadi, it turns out, created a monster.

He hadn’t meant to. After his best friend Nahem was killed by a car bomb, Hadi had gone to the mortuary to collect his friend’s body. There, he “was shocked to see that the bodies of explosion victims were all mixed up together.” The mortuary worker told him to “put a body together and carry it off,” and Hadi did what he was told, but burying a random collection of parts seemed wrong, so he started sewing them together, picking up what he was missing off the street. In Baghdad in 2005, when the novel is set, there were plenty of body parts to go around. Hadi’s hope, as he explains to Mahmoud, was to hand the body “over to the forensics department, because it was a complete corpse.... so it wouldn’t be treated as trash, so it would be respected like other dead people and given a proper burial.” But Hadi never has the chance, because the very night he sews the nose on, the wandering soul of another bomb victim descends into the patchwork corpse, hoping he’ll now be buried. Instead, the composite body comes to life.

Antics ensue. An elderly Christian woman named Elshiva mistakes the reanimated corpse for her long-lost son Daniel, who was dragged off 20 years ago to fight Iran and never came home. Then, moved by Elshiva’s love and grief, the bomb-victim-become-monster-named-Daniel decides that Baghdad needs justice, so he starts killing the people who killed the people his body parts came from. The monster’s campaign quickly spirals out of control, and soon he’s leading a personal militia, butchering innocents to harvest more parts to replace the ones that keep falling off his rotting body, and recording an interview with himself for Mahmoud’s magazine to help manage his public image.



Most of Saadawi’s novel isn’t really about the monster, but about Baghdadis circa 2005, specifically the inhabitants of the run-down, somewhat seedy neighborhood of Bataween, in the first months of what would become a brutal sectarian civil war. Saadawi’s characters’ lives are marked by losses going back decades, well before the 2003 invasion, to the crippling sanctions imposed by the U.S. in the 1990s, the Persian Gulf War, and the war between Iraq and Iran, which the U.S. also had its hand in. Elshiva, particularly, is isolated in her sorrow: Not only are her son and husband dead, but her daughters have fled the country, and she only gets to talk to them a few minutes every week. One of the most affecting passages in the book describes Elshiva’s efforts to keep in touch with them: