Each of today’s books are inspired by real events or the author’s own experiences, but I could just as easily have titled these ‘books about trauma’.
Take care when reading, friends! I’ve included some content warnings for the below as well (and a reminder that StoryGraph has a great collection of reader-source CWs for many books).
Frankenstein in Baghdad by Ahmed Saadawi, translated by Jonathan Wright
Genre: Literary Fiction | Horror
Own voices: Iraqi
Content warnings: death, violence, body horror, suicide, war, murder
From the rubble-strewn streets of U.S.-occupied Baghdad, Hadi–a scavenger and an oddball fixture at a local café–collects human body parts and stitches them together to create a corpse. His goal, he claims, is for the government to recognize the parts as people and to give them proper burial. But when the corpse goes missing, a wave of eerie murders sweeps the city, and reports stream in of a horrendous-looking criminal who, though shot, cannot be killed.
Frankenstein is one of my favourite classics so I was very intrigued by this retelling. CWs for my review here (as well as the book) as I get into some of the graphic detail and heavier content in setting up this story.
This book follows the original classic with a murderous creature formed out of multiple corpses. However in Saadawi’s story, these corpses are victims of suicide bombings, the story set in Iran following the USA’s invasion, and the creature sets out to seek justice for these parts of it’s self.
While the author doesn’t directly comment on foreign conflicts and warring governments, we see the horrific impacts of this violence on each character in the book and the larger implications and realizations are subtly pushed forward throughout the story for the reader to come to on their own.
Because of this more subtle undertone, it does feel that the descriptions of death and destruction are at times callous or impartial but I think the author’s intentions and style work beautifully in getting his point across.
Spines in a Line 