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Bezig met laden... The Corpse Exhibition: And Other Stories of Iraqdoor Hassan Blasim
Best of World Literature (239) Bezig met laden...
Meld je aan bij LibraryThing om erachter te komen of je dit boek goed zult vinden. Op dit moment geen Discussie gesprekken over dit boek. These stories left me with a feeling of cultural inaccessibility. The writing is strong and the characters engaging but within each tale is a violence and surreal turn that would leave me uneasy or simply confused. I suspect that this is the intent, and that it may in fact scratch the surface of what it must be like to live in a region that since ancient times: has been invaded; involved in internecine wars; is regularly subject to internal political, religious, and tribal skirmishes. It's gotta be disorienting for the impoverished living in an oil rich nation and regardless of status, I imagine life for many probably is marred by violence and surreal turns of events. The sense of dis-ease is perhaps what Blasim is targeting. If so, bulls-eye. The stories I felt I best understood: "The Nightmares of Carlos Fuentes" and "The Reality and the Record." Most intrigued by: "The Corpse Exhibition", "The Thousand and One Knives", and "The Song of the Goats". Most WTF: "The Green Zone Rabbit". Most compelling: "Iraqi Christ". How to even begin to talk about these stories? Many have said they are brutal, and of course they are brutal. In these stories, war and violent conflict is background noise. It is usually not even worth mentioning who the current war or conflict is with, let alone which side was the aggressor and what their motivations. War is. Death is. Now how do you make sense of it? Many of these stories are about storytelling. In the title story, a secret organization tells stories with publicly displayed corpses. (At times, this story seems an apt frame for the rest.) In "An Army Newspaper," an editor wins acclaim after publishing a dead soldier's stories as his own, only to be driven into paranoia and madness when the stories keep coming. In "The Song of the Goats," a radio show comes to record war stories -- contestants line up and compete, each bragging that theirs is the most heartbreaking. I found the collection as a whole pretty bleak, as expected. Some stories ripped my heart out, while a few fell a little flat. Perhaps my favorite story is "A Thousand and One Knives." It is the story of a group of people who discover they all have mysterious power -- they can make knives disappear. Then they find someone who can make them reappear. It's such a strange little story, but it runs the gamut of horrible brutality, mystery, and moments of grace and hope. The last being elements definitely not present in all of the stories, however limited they may be even in this one. Recommended to fans of dark fiction, to people who seek to understand what life is like where death has been made cheap. geen besprekingen | voeg een bespreking toe
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"An explosive new voice in fiction emerges from Iraq in this blistering debut by "perhaps the best writer of Arabic fiction alive" (The Guardian) The first major literary work about the Iraq War from an Iraqi perspective, The Corpse Exhibition shows us the war as we have never seen it before. Here is a world not only of soldiers and assassins, hostages and car bombers, refugees and terrorists, but also of madmen and prophets, angels and djinni, sorcerers and spirits. Blending shocking realism with flights of fantasy, Hassan Blasim offers us a pageant of horrors, as haunting as the photos of Abu Ghraib and as difficult to look away from, but shot through with a gallows humor that yields an unflinching comedy of the macabre. Gripping and hallucinatory, this is a new kind of storytelling forged in the crucible of war"-- Geen bibliotheekbeschrijvingen gevonden. |
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Google Books — Bezig met laden... GenresDewey Decimale Classificatie (DDC)892.7Literature Literature of other languages Middle Eastern languages Arabic (Egypt, Lebanon, Palestine, Saudi Arabia, Sudan)LC-classificatieWaarderingGemiddelde:
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A short story collection that I think succeeded in documenting terrible things, without sinking under its own weight, is [b:Kolyma Tales|109812|Kolyma Tales|Varlam Shalamov|https://d.gr-assets.com/books/1348611733s/109812.jpg|105834] by [a:Varlam Shalamov|63552|Varlam Shalamov|https://d.gr-assets.com/authors/1222952456p2/63552.jpg]. ( )