The monster is a powerful metaphor, but the real reason the novel works is because Saadawi writes with a rare combination of generosity, cruelty, and black humor. He has a journalist’s eye for detail and a cartoonist’s sense of satire (he’s been both). What the reader comes away remembering are not the fantastic elements in the story, but the day-to-day struggles of Baghdadis.
What follows, in this assured and hallucinatory story, is funny and horrifying in a near-perfect admixture. Funny because Saadawi wrings a good deal of black humor out of the way the monster’s pieces fall off at inopportune moments ... Saadawi’s tone can be sly, but his intentions are deadly serious. He’s written a complex allegory for the tribal cruelties in Iraq in the wake of the American invasion. His book is especially moving about women who have lost their sons and husbands, and who wonder if they are alive and will ever return ... Saadawi blends the unearthly, the horrific and the mundane to terrific effect ... You get the sense, throughout Frankenstein in Baghdad, that Saadawi’s creature, alive with malevolent intelligence, is feeding off its own destructive energy. The reader feeds off it as well. What happened in Iraq was a spiritual disaster, and this brave and ingenious novel takes that idea and uncorks all its possible meanings.
In this surreal, visceral and mordant novel ... Saadawi stitches the narrative together from so many points of view and points in time, one often overlapping the other, that the tension has a tendency to dissipate. But this is in keeping with the novel’s open preoccupation with war’s absurdity ... Saadawi’s strange, violent and wickedly funny book borrows heavily from the science fiction canon, and pays back the debt with interest: it is a remarkable achievement, and one that, regrettably, is unlikely ever to lose its urgent relevancy.
The absurdity of justice, rife throughout the novel, is one of Saadawi’s most powerful critiques ... Saadawi masterfully demonstrates that US attempts to establish the rule of law in Iraq did not fall short for any Orientalist 'clash of civilizations' reasons. Instead, he portrays US forces as indirectly criminal ... Saadawi...depict[s] Baghdad as a space where the absurd is not a function of Islam or the 'backward' Arab mind but rather the product of the United States’s imperialist encroachment.
Frankenstein in Baghdad answers the question, 'Who or what is a terrorist?' with 'That depends.' To all the citizens of Bataween, the monster Hadi creates is as frightening as any American soldier. More conspicuously, the city of Baghdad is a constant place of fear because a suicide bomber could come at any time to cause suffering, destruction, and mass tragedy ... Frankenstein in Baghdad is a rare novel for how simple its structure and tone are on the surface. Saadawi’s sentences are smooth, crisp, and McCarthy-esque; translator Jonathan Wright does an incredible job of bringing the haunting, brooding rhythm of the words to life. The war novel after Iraq is alive in America, and an Iraqi perspective here gives a shot of high voltage to a reanimated discussion.
The success of Frankenstein in Baghdad is that, amid its unbelievable landscape—contemporary Baghdad—the presence of a sewn-together zombie seems hardly implausible ... the dystopian elements of the novel are not rooted in its speculative, supernatural elements but rather in the very real, nightmarish violence of 2005 Baghdad ... Frankenstein in Baghdad isn’t speculative doomsday porn that offers cathartic release; it’s a confrontation with despair that, in its use of comedy, refuses to be what Jill Lepore called in The New Yorker a 'fiction of submission.' Frankenstein in Baghdad recognizes truths about the present day it describes instead of allowing a means for readers to escape and take solace in the comfortable idea that these books are only projections into an unreal future ... Saadawi has sutured together a dystopian universe that confronts the horrors of reality, rather than offering an escape from it and, in doing so, has provided American science fiction lovers—readers and writers alike—a new and refreshing template for dystopian fiction fitting to our time.
[Frankenstein in Baghdad] emerges as an oblique and darkly humorous commentary on the self-perpetuating nature of violence, but is periodically drained of tension by the Whatsitsname’s lengthy absences from the proceedings ... Perhaps the reason for this owes something to the author’s rather obvious pursuit of allegory. Because Saadawi wants the Whatsitsname to embody (literally) post-invasion Iraq’s pervasive violence and criminality, he repeatedly feels obliged to turn away from the monster’s exploits to explore myriad real-life dangers menacing ordinary Iraqis. Despite the costly tradeoff it entails, this conceit works.
Saadawi strikes a feverish balance between fantasy and hard realism in Frankenstein in Baghdad. The fabric of the city’s neighborhoods couldn’t be more sharply etched … As Saadawi moves among their different points of view, all the characters have their say — including the Whatsitsname which, like Victor Frankenstein’s creation in Shelley’s novel, is given an opportunity to relate its own version of events (into a digital recorder, this being the 21st century) … [Saadawi] delivers a vision of his war-mangled city that’s hard to forget.
...as with any great literary work, this novel doesn’t just tell a story. Rather, it unfolds across multiple dimensions, each layer peeling back to reveal something new: the structure of the novel itself (stories within stories, references to the 'author' as a character); buildings that, when damaged by bombs, reveal archaeological treasures; and identities that turn out merely to be covers for other (perhaps still false) identities. Exquisitely translated by Jonathan Wright, this novel breaks through the superficial news stories and helps us see more clearly what the American invasion has wrought, how violence begets violence, and how tenuous is the line between innocence and guilt. Brilliant and horrifying, Frankenstein in Baghdad is essential reading.
Frankenstein in Baghdad... is a story about how matter moves between states of life and death ... In a sense, Frankenstein in Baghdad depicts a conflict between different kinds of media ... Saadawi’s monster illustrates the redemptive power of even the most ephemeral material. No matter how far down it is 'buried,' it has the potential to rise from the dead and assert its own story.
There is no shortage of wonderful, literate Frankenstein reimaginings but few so viscerally mine Shelley’s story for its metaphoric riches ... In graceful, economical prose, Saadawi places us in a city of ghosts, where missing people return all the time, justice is fleeting, and even good intentions rot. 'I am the first true Iraqi citizen,' muses the monster, who is a 'composite of victims' as much as he is his own extremist. A haunting and startling mix of horror, mystery, and tragedy.
As a metaphor for the cycle of violence, it’s quite nuanced, but Saadawi’s black sense of humor and grotesque imagery keep the novel grounded in its genre. Call it 'Gothic Arabesque,' but this haunting novel brazenly confronts the violence visited upon this country by those who did not call it home. A startling way to teach an old lesson: an eye for an eye makes the whole world blind.
While the Frankenstein through line doesn’t quite hold Saadawi’s novel together, the book is successful as a portrait of a neighborhood, and a way of life, under siege ... This is a harrowing and affecting look at the day-to-day life of war-torn Iraq.
