The Corpse Exhibition: And Other Stories Of Iraq
by Hassan Blasim /
2014 / English / PDF
3.9 MB Download
These 14 surrealistic stories are all about Iraq’s endless wars. Americans are mostly off-stage, but “The Madman of Freedom Square” is a sly, dark allegory of their arrival and sometimes miraculous effect. Many characters are terrorists, as in “The Killers and the Compass,” in which a veteran terrorist explains the divinity one acquires in the disposition of extreme violence—not a Muslim divinity but a personal one rising from inspiring terror and killing. The title story is all about the fine art of displaying corpses in public places. The matter-of-fact tone of its first-person narrator, a sort of instructor, suggests Kafka’s “A Report to an Academy.” But one thinks of Borges in perhaps the best entry, “The Nightmares of Carlos Fuentes,” about an Iraqi immigrant to Holland who’s determined to put his country’s evils behind him, even to the point that he pretends to be Mexican. An interesting choice for larger fiction collections and perhaps base libraries. –John Mort Review Winner of the Independent Foreign Fiction Prize One of Publishers Weekly’s 10 Best Books of the Year “Surreal and mind-blowing and completely necessary.” —Jayne Anne Phillips, The Wall Street Journal, “Favorite Books of the Year” “Arresting, auspicious . . . Well-plotted, blackly comic . . . Sharp, tragicomic moments . . . persist in memory. . . . Its opening story [features] a terrorist middle manager who wouldn’t be out of place in one of George Saunders’s workplace nightmares. . . . ‘The Song of the Goats’ [is] a cunning gem. . . . If a short story could break the heart of a rock, this might just be the one. . . . The collection’s last story is so complicatedly good [with] an ending worthy of Rod Serling. Mr. Blasim’s stories owe more than a little of their dream logic to [Carlos] Fuentes and Serling, with maybe some Julio Cortázar thrown in. . . . Their sequence imparts a mounting novelistic power.” —The New York Times “Brilliant and disturbing . . . Bitter, furious and unforgettable, the stories seem to have been carved out of the country’s suppurating history like pieces of ragged flesh.” —The Wall Street Journal “Superb . . . The existence of this book is reason for hope, proof of the power of storytelling.” —The Boston Globe “Subtly and powerfully evocative . . . Superbly translated.” —The New York Review of Books “Visceral, full of horror and absurdity . . . Blasim is an Iraqi Kafka with a touch of Edgar Allan Poe thrown in, and his pen spares no one who commits atrocities, Americans and Iraqis alike.” —Brian Castner, “This Week’s Must Read” on NPR’s Weekend All Things Considered “Perhaps the greatest writer of Arabic fiction alive . . . [His stories are] crisp and shocking . . . cruel, funny and unsettling [with] hooks and twists that will lodge in any mind.” —The Guardian
