• HASSAN BLASIM'S DARK STORIES

    Iraq is not a place we feel we must imagine. Since 2003 the country has been full of cameras and journalists as well as tanks, conducting interviews and documenting the horror. We are all too familiar with images of bombed mosques, masked men with rifles and Baghdad in flames. It can be easy to believe we know Iraq pretty well.

    But how it feels to be Iraqi is not a story told often enough. In Hassan Blasim's first collection of stories, translated from Arabic by Jonathan Wright, shafts of light are cast into dark lives of people betrayed successively by leaders, occupiers and insurgents. There is a savagery to these characters, inspired by the traumas of the Iran-Iraq war, the sanctions of the 1990s (which left the country broke and hungry) and the explosive bloodshed of post-invasion Baghdad. This slim collection reveals the way Iraqi life is even bleaker and more brutal than the pyrotechnics of warfare suggest.

    The tales veer from bizarre to lifelike, full of devilish details and macabre depictions of daily life. One story describes an imaginary collective that makes public art from cadavers. In another, an ambulance driver discovers sacks of heads hacked from bodies--a reality in Iraq from 2005 to 2007. One is left with the sense that Iraq's people have stretched their capacity to be horrified to such an extent that an author must struggle to create something too gory to be believed.  read more »


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