PositiveWords Without BordersThe Corpse Exhibition is an exhausting book. But it\'s also exciting, in the way that, say, items saved from a burning building are exciting—because they\'ve survived, and because they still smell like fire ... much of what you might expect from a book set in today\'s Iraq is missing. There are no American characters. The American occupation of Iraq does come up for mention, except as a nuisance, rather than as a central element in Iraqi life. Blasim treats Iraq\'s recent history in a cursory fashion ... Iraq\'s problems pile up relentlessly until you can\'t remember if there was ever a time before the trouble began. Blasim doesn\'t say much about geography, either. He doesn\'t tell us what Baghdad, or Kirkuk, look like. He often doesn\'t tell us what city we\'re in at all. The streets are crowded and filthy, and the countryside is rocky. It\'s a landscape of endless, inarticulate trouble and we, the readers, plunge right into the middle of it ... Blasim sometimes blurs the line between the real and unreal ... One can only hope much of the menace is imagined, but Blasim himself might suggest that we’d be wagering hope against reason.
