“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.”
–Dwight Garner, The New York Times, January 22, 2018
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