In US-occupied Baghdad, Hadi, a junk dealer and neighbourhood storyteller, begins collecting body parts from bombing sites and stitching them together into a single corpse.
At first, it is partly an act of grotesque mourning: an attempt to give the scattered dead one body, one name, one proper burial. But the stitched-together body disappears, and soon rumours spread through the city of a creature moving through Baghdad, hunting those responsible for the violence that made him.
The creature, known as “Whatsitsname,” is made from victims of different sects, classes, histories, and allegiances, which means his revenge cannot remain clean for long. Every body part demands justice; every act of justice creates new victims; the moral ledger becomes a butcher’s apron. Around him, Saadawi builds a teeming Baghdad of journalists, widows, opportunists, officials, hotel workers, astrologers, soldiers, and frightened neighbours, all trying to survive inside a city where death has become routine but never ordinary.
Winner of the International Prize for Arabic Fiction and longlisted for the 2018 Man Booker International, this is a sharp, strange, blackly comic novel about war, occupation, revenge and superstition.
Oneworld Publications trade paperback, 2018 reprint; translated from the Arabic by Jonathan Wright. Good second-hand condition with some visible cover marking, edge wear and light signs of handling; internally clean and readable.
