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“The king ordered that the saint be placed in the olive press until his flesh was torn to pieces and he died. They then threw him out of the city, but the Lord Jesus gathered the pieces together and brought him back to life, and he went back into the city”—The Story of St. George, the Great Martyr��

Frankenstein in Baghdad is an amazing novel that clearly assumes you at least know about Mary Shelley’s work, which it riffs off in a political/spiritual landscape set in the ongoing nightmare wreckage of Baghdad, Iraq, a place we all know as a site of suicide bombings, car bombs and terror more than its historical relation as the cultural mecca it remains. So it’s horror—as is Frankenstein—featuring a monster, but it is also an anguished love letter to and lament for the author’s beloved city. Filled with lyrical writing, honoring the dead there, it also possesses one of the darkest veins of black humor I have ever read. Fitting to use horror, surrealism, magical realism when there are just no words in the vocabulary of realism for the emotional effects of a terrorist act.

Hadi, a junk dealer, gathers body parts from the wreckage of unending bombings so he piece together a whole body and can give his friend Nahem a proper burial. Elishva too, wants to properly mourn her son, Daniel, killed in the Iran-Iraq War, though Elishva doesn’t yet quite accept he is dead. Hadi finds body parts where he can, from a range of humans attached to sects, good folks, criminals, whatever. And presto! We have a material representation, a map, of the body politic of Iraq, a deeply sad if macabre rendering of a body of fragments that fall off and need to be replaced all the time by the body parts of newly dead..

“Because I'm made up of body parts of people from diverse backgrounds - ethnicities, tribes, races and social classes - I represent the impossible mix that never was achieved in the past. I'm the first true Iraqi citizen, he (the Whatsitsname) thinks.��

But one day this body, this Whatisname, walks away and begins to take revenge on those he sees as responsible for what has happened to the collective him and his country. Revenge, you ask? I thought this was poetry, a national tragedy! What about the need to heal? Well, this is Frankenstein territory, which means it is horror, in a world gone very very wrong. Macabre? Right, but also surprisingly lyrical and elegiac and tragic and sad even as it is sometimes bizarrely funny. For instance, in the process, Elishva claims Whatisname as Daniel, her son, returning as promised by St George!

How to get at the humor? Well, there’s a certain kind of rage and tenderness that attends Hadi’s job of stitching together bodies but its also outrageous comedy. And religion is part of what heals us but also divides and sometimes destroys us, so some of what we read acknowledges its importance and sometimes it is just flat out satire. And there’s this tender aspect of caring about the material body and in another light it’s a ludicrous act of desecration. It’s surreal, this act, impossible, and yet hopeful, giving hope in one instance to a mother who thinks her long lost son has come back home, not dead at all.

There’s so much I am not getting at here. The stories that people tell both sustain and obfuscate: Hadi was a well-known liar. Can we even believe his story of whatisname? What about all these djinns and apparitions and saints?

Frankenstein in Baghdad was originally published in Arabic in 2013. In 2014, it was awarded the International Prize for Arabic Fiction (sometimes known as the "Arabic Booker"). And I think it is a masterpiece I'll never forget, and will need to read again to better understand.