To most Americans, the name Guantanamo is convenient shorthand for the excesses of the so-called War On Terror. No one who reads Dorothea Dieckmann’s lacerating novel, however, will ever again have the comfort of
thinking of the infamous prison in abstract terms.

Guantanamo: A Novel is an unforgiving read. Dieckmann, a German novelist and critic, takes as her protagonist a young tourist named Rashid and drops him without exposition into a nightmarish series of torture and beatings. The effect, in the hands of her calm, precise, lyrical prose, is disorienting and scouringly brutal. Only through a series of hallucinatory flashbacks does the reader learn how cruelly arbitrary Rashid’s fate is.

Judging Dieckmann’s novel, which is well-served by Tim Mohr’s extraordinarily nuanced translation, is a question of literary prejudice. The book is beautifully written and clearly serves a moral purpose; at the same time, reading it is a grim and joyless experience. Ironically, perhaps only a European could provide such an enervating account of the fallout of America’s national obsession.

From THE L MAGAZINE, August 15 2007 ( )

When I travelled to Amsterdam in March 2008, I flew out of Eskimo City, where the TSA agent manually looked through my checked suitcase. When she was going through my things, she noticed that one of the books I was carrying with me was German writer Dorothy Dieckmann's 2004 novella "Guantanamo." "Oh, that looks interesting" she said, with something of an edge in her voice. I didn't say anything, just raised my eyebrows. (I hadn't been aware that the TSA provided literary criticism along with their security services.)

The TSA agent was correct; it was quite interesting, though disturbing and nightmarish would be applicable as well. The central character is a German Muslim, Rashid, who becomes the subject of a terrifying "rendition" while he is on holiday in South Asia. In his bizarre experiences of travelling to Guantanamo, and through his brutal interrogation there, Rashid loses the thread of his experiences and almost loses the sense of his identity. Dieckmann cleverly never makes it clear what Rashid is suspected of, or whether he is actually "involved" with the anti-American forces in any significant way. Instead, the "truth" is as unclear as the hazy Cuban skies. Frustating as it is for the reader not to be able to know the "truth," I think frustration is an entirely appropriate authorial device when depicting the Kafka-esque and Orwellian nightmare that is Guantanamo. ( )

Dorothea Dieckmann's short novel, Guantanamo, easily makes, if not tops, my list of best books published 2007. In fact, I'm going to pull out some tired old war horses here: It grabs you from the first page. It is masterfully written. It is a "must read." Most important, it is important.

Guantanamo does what excellent fiction should do -- transport us to places we can't go. Here, that place is inside the mind of a prisoner at the U.S. military's detention facility at Guantanamo Bay. Rashid is a 20-year old nonpracticing Muslim born and raised in Germany. He is half Indian and half German. He travels to Dehli to meet his grandmother and eventually befriends a young Afghan who takes him to Pakistan. Rashid gets caught up in the midst of an anti-American demonstration, is arrested and ends up at Gitmo.

Those are the "facts" (or are they?) of how Rashid ended up being a prisoner of the U.S. military. While the facts (or Rashid's memory) may occasionally blur, Dieckmann's exploration of the mind is as clear and expressive as you can find. Guantanamo, first published in Germany in 2004 and translated by Tim Mohr for last year's U.S. edition, takes us inside Rashid's thoughts, memories and emotions. The physical effects of his arrest, treatment, imprisonment and interrogations are certainly part and parcel of this -- and described in haunting detail. But this is as much an investigation of the psyche, one that is equally as haunting. Dieckmann's concise yet eloquent prose takes us on a harrowing journey that at times borders on a fever dream. She relies on public descriptions of the base and conditions there for the story's framework but, as she notes, "As regards the inner details, only imagination can provide those[.]"

Balance of review at here.