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Guantanamo
At the beginning of the Afghan war, young Rashid, born in Hamburg to an Indian father and a German mother, travels to India to claim an inheritance. There, he befriends a young Afghan and continues his journey to Peshawar, where he ends up in the middle of an anti-American demonstration. He is arrested, handed over to the Americans, and taken to the notorious Guantanamo.
What ensues is a remarkable literary experiment, a novel based on meticulous research. In six scenes, it describes Rashid’s life at the camp. Sensitive yet utterly unsentimental, the novel explores the existential consequences of isolation, suppression, and uncertainty � paralyzing fear, psychotic delusions, manic identification with fellow prisoners, and ultimately, resignation. Written with fierce moral clarity and a remarkable economy of expression, Guantanamo functions as both a political statement and a fascinating examination of the prisoner/jailer relationship.
What ensues is a remarkable literary experiment, a novel based on meticulous research. In six scenes, it describes Rashid’s life at the camp. Sensitive yet utterly unsentimental, the novel explores the existential consequences of isolation, suppression, and uncertainty � paralyzing fear, psychotic delusions, manic identification with fellow prisoners, and ultimately, resignation. Written with fierce moral clarity and a remarkable economy of expression, Guantanamo functions as both a political statement and a fascinating examination of the prisoner/jailer relationship.
- GenresFiction
151 pages, Paperback
First published March 28, 2007
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Displaying 1 - 8 of 8 reviews
June 25, 2018
The last of my reads of the 11 past winners of the Best Translated Book Award.
Guantanamo was translated by Tim Mohr from Dorothea Dieckmann's German language original:
It was something of a surprise winner of the inaugural Best Translated Book Award in 2008. It beat off competition from, amongst others, by the renowned Roberto Bolaño, and , the latter two both winners of the UK equivalent Independent Foreign Fiction Prize.
Original published in 2004, the novel was written at a time when few details of life inside Guantanamo were available to the public and the impact of the novel, read in 2018, is a little diminished by the first hand accounts that have since emerged.
Nevertheless this is an impressive work of the imagination (and what research was achievable at the time). Narrated in the 3rd person but from the perspective of Rashid, a prisoner in the camp, Dieckmann's fractured prose does an excellent job of capturing both the physical discomfort and the psychological disorientation caused by the conditions within which the prisoner's are kept.
It never stops. Day and night, in every light, in every waking second, it can hit him and drag him back - back to the point before which he can't remember anything. Deaf, blind and unable to move, stuck rehashing the beginning of it all. Each time he tries to get back to before his arrival here, searching for a way out. But the nightmare just plays out the same way all over again, and he lands on his knees exactly like the men in front of him, again and again.
Rashid - at least in his own self-account - is innocent, not a terrorist or even a fundamentalist sympathiser, not even an Islamic believer, having travelled from his home in Hamburg, Germany to India to visit his grandmother, and then armed with nothing more offensive than a Lonely Planet Guide, going on to travelling in India and Pakistan, eventually ending up near to the Afghan border where is he caught up in an anti-American demonstration and arrested. I have seen suggestions Dieckmann was inspired by the case of , or at least that it gained her book attention, and in one sense the decision to focus on a potentially innocent victim to be slightly weakens the book, since it is an equally valid question as to whether the techniques used in Guantanamo are humane or even effective when used on those who have committed violent acts.
But Dieckmann leaves the reader some ambiguity as Rashid is confused in his own mind, still disorientated as to how a trip to see his family has left him in a American prison camp, and his interrogators offer him an alternative explanation for his own account:
He worries about them—about the words he says—and about the possibility that they will come back to him altered, changed into something else, something dangerous.
he starts to question what is true and what he, or they, have imagined (he wasn't sure anymore which ones were real). And he starts to take comfort in the words of the Quran with which he has been provided on the assumption he is a pious believer.
But all Rashid really wants to do is go home, except that he gradually realises that the camp authorities haven't really given thought to that element:
It wasn't anybody's job to release prisoners—that there was no plan, not even a secret one.
Overall, a book I found impressive but perhaps which didn't quite grab me emotionally as much as I expected. This review captures better the issue I had:
And seen 10 years later, the BTBA award looks an odd choice compared to others on the shortlist, albeit the decision was made not by a jury, but rather by a vote of readers of the website.
3.5 stars, rounded to 3 for now.
Guantanamo was translated by Tim Mohr from Dorothea Dieckmann's German language original:
It was something of a surprise winner of the inaugural Best Translated Book Award in 2008. It beat off competition from, amongst others, by the renowned Roberto Bolaño, and , the latter two both winners of the UK equivalent Independent Foreign Fiction Prize.
Original published in 2004, the novel was written at a time when few details of life inside Guantanamo were available to the public and the impact of the novel, read in 2018, is a little diminished by the first hand accounts that have since emerged.
Nevertheless this is an impressive work of the imagination (and what research was achievable at the time). Narrated in the 3rd person but from the perspective of Rashid, a prisoner in the camp, Dieckmann's fractured prose does an excellent job of capturing both the physical discomfort and the psychological disorientation caused by the conditions within which the prisoner's are kept.
It never stops. Day and night, in every light, in every waking second, it can hit him and drag him back - back to the point before which he can't remember anything. Deaf, blind and unable to move, stuck rehashing the beginning of it all. Each time he tries to get back to before his arrival here, searching for a way out. But the nightmare just plays out the same way all over again, and he lands on his knees exactly like the men in front of him, again and again.
Rashid - at least in his own self-account - is innocent, not a terrorist or even a fundamentalist sympathiser, not even an Islamic believer, having travelled from his home in Hamburg, Germany to India to visit his grandmother, and then armed with nothing more offensive than a Lonely Planet Guide, going on to travelling in India and Pakistan, eventually ending up near to the Afghan border where is he caught up in an anti-American demonstration and arrested. I have seen suggestions Dieckmann was inspired by the case of , or at least that it gained her book attention, and in one sense the decision to focus on a potentially innocent victim to be slightly weakens the book, since it is an equally valid question as to whether the techniques used in Guantanamo are humane or even effective when used on those who have committed violent acts.
But Dieckmann leaves the reader some ambiguity as Rashid is confused in his own mind, still disorientated as to how a trip to see his family has left him in a American prison camp, and his interrogators offer him an alternative explanation for his own account:
He worries about them—about the words he says—and about the possibility that they will come back to him altered, changed into something else, something dangerous.
he starts to question what is true and what he, or they, have imagined (he wasn't sure anymore which ones were real). And he starts to take comfort in the words of the Quran with which he has been provided on the assumption he is a pious believer.
But all Rashid really wants to do is go home, except that he gradually realises that the camp authorities haven't really given thought to that element:
It wasn't anybody's job to release prisoners—that there was no plan, not even a secret one.
Overall, a book I found impressive but perhaps which didn't quite grab me emotionally as much as I expected. This review captures better the issue I had:
And seen 10 years later, the BTBA award looks an odd choice compared to others on the shortlist, albeit the decision was made not by a jury, but rather by a vote of readers of the website.
3.5 stars, rounded to 3 for now.
September 11, 2019
Dorothea Dieckmann's short novel,
, easily makes, if not tops, my list of best books published 2007. In fact, I'm going to pull out some tired old war horses here: It grabs you from the first page. It is masterfully written. It is a "must read." Most important, it is important.[return][return]Guantanamo does what excellent fiction should do -- transport us to places we can't go. Here, that place is inside the mind of a prisoner at the U.S. military's detention facility at Guantanamo Bay. Rashid is a 20-year old nonpracticing Muslim born and raised in Germany. He is half Indian and half German. He travels to Dehli to meet his grandmother and eventually befriends a young Afghan who takes him to Pakistan. Rashid gets caught up in the midst of an anti-American demonstration, is arrested and ends up at Gitmo.[return][return]Those are the "facts" (or are they?) of how Rashid ended up being a prisoner of the U.S. military. While the facts (or Rashid's memory) may occasionally blur, Dieckmann's exploration of the mind is as clear and expressive as you can find. Guantanamo, first published in Germany in 2004 and translated by Tim Mohr for last year's U.S. edition, takes us inside Rashid's thoughts, memories and emotions. The physical effects of his arrest, treatment, imprisonment and interrogations are certainly part and parcel of this -- and described in haunting detail. But this is as much an investigation of the psyche, one that is equally as haunting. Dieckmann's concise yet eloquent prose takes us on a harrowing journey that at times borders on a fever dream. She relies on public descriptions of the base and conditions there for the story's framework but, as she notes, "As regards the inner details, only imagination can provide those[.]"[return][return]Balance of review at .
October 5, 2015
It is an interesting read but it requires you to like the kind of writing that uninterruptedly focus on the main characters senses. It was not my favourite reading mainly because I believe this same way of writing distracts a lot from the story itself and, at times, becomes heavy to read.
December 5, 2007
To most Americans, the name Guantanamo is convenient shorthand for the excesses of the so-called War On Terror. No one who reads Dorothea Dieckmann’s lacerating novel, however, will ever again have the comfort of
thinking of the infamous prison in abstract terms.
Guantanamo: A Novel is an unforgiving read. Dieckmann, a German novelist and critic, takes as her protagonist a young tourist named Rashid and drops him without exposition into a nightmarish series of torture and beatings. The effect, in the hands of her calm, precise, lyrical prose, is disorienting and scouringly brutal. Only through a series of hallucinatory flashbacks does the reader learn how cruelly arbitrary Rashid’s fate is.
Judging Dieckmann’s novel, which is well-served by Tim Mohr’s extraordinarily nuanced translation, is a question of literary prejudice. The book is beautifully written and clearly serves a moral purpose; at the same time, reading it is a grim and joyless experience. Ironically, perhaps only a European could provide such an enervating account of the fallout of America’s national obsession.
From THE L MAGAZINE, August 15 2007
thinking of the infamous prison in abstract terms.
Guantanamo: A Novel is an unforgiving read. Dieckmann, a German novelist and critic, takes as her protagonist a young tourist named Rashid and drops him without exposition into a nightmarish series of torture and beatings. The effect, in the hands of her calm, precise, lyrical prose, is disorienting and scouringly brutal. Only through a series of hallucinatory flashbacks does the reader learn how cruelly arbitrary Rashid’s fate is.
Judging Dieckmann’s novel, which is well-served by Tim Mohr’s extraordinarily nuanced translation, is a question of literary prejudice. The book is beautifully written and clearly serves a moral purpose; at the same time, reading it is a grim and joyless experience. Ironically, perhaps only a European could provide such an enervating account of the fallout of America’s national obsession.
From THE L MAGAZINE, August 15 2007
April 29, 2009
This is a novel written by a German woman about being an Islamic prisoner in Guantanamo Bay. Large portions of the novel are written in stream of consciousness and/or dream/hallucinogenic sequences. Large portions of it are very hard to muddle through. I found myself enjoying the more clearheaded descriptive portions of the book. While I understand that she is trying to write a novel more about the psychological state of that kind of imprisonment than the true reality of it, it was hard for me to endure. Maybe that's the point, never ending stream of consciousness babble = never ending imprisonment. I feel that. Makes 150 pages seem long.
October 22, 2012
Interesting book. The scenes in the prison camp itself are very realistic and horrible. There are also a lot of hallucinations and dream sequences, some of which are quite powerful. The dreams become entangled with reality in a surrealistic way which can be difficult to read. I have to say I didn't always 'get' the dreams.
I think one problem with the novel is that Dieckmann doesn't really tell us enough about Rashid's life before he arrives at Guantanamo. We only learn little scraps about his family life and his travels (nothing about his friends, school life, etc). She has made him a bit too anonymous, I think. Still, I'm glad I read this book and I'd certainly recommend it.
I think one problem with the novel is that Dieckmann doesn't really tell us enough about Rashid's life before he arrives at Guantanamo. We only learn little scraps about his family life and his travels (nothing about his friends, school life, etc). She has made him a bit too anonymous, I think. Still, I'm glad I read this book and I'd certainly recommend it.
February 5, 2008
Not a large book, but a tough read...a fictionalized account of a young man's time at Guatanamo. It really got me thinking about what torture victims go through there and really anywhere in the world...if we all realized that the people in Guantanamo and in prisons anywhere are someone's son or daughter, grandson or granddaughter, mother or father maybe that would help guide how we treat them and result in more humane treatment?
December 28, 2013
Random purchase from the library weeding. Not the most christmassy choice I have ever made. Got rather lost in some of the sequences though this is probably the idea
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