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Iraq + 100 poses a question to contemporary Iraqi writers: what
might your home city look like in the year 2103 - exactly 100 years
after the disastrous American and British-led invasion of Iraq? How
might that war reach across a century of repair and rebirth, and
affect the state of the country - its politics, its religion, its
language, its culture - and how might Iraq have finally escaped its
chaos, and found its own peace, a hundred years down the line? As
well as being an exercise in escaping the politics of the present,
this anthology is also an opportunity for a hotbed of contemporary
Arabic writers to offer its own spin on science fiction and
fantasy.
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The Iraqi Christ (Paperback)
Hassan Blasim; Translated by Jonathan Wright
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R323
R292
Discovery Miles 2 920
Save R31 (10%)
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Ships in 9 - 15 working days
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From legends of the desert to horrors of the forest, Blasim’s
stories blend the fantastic with the everyday, the surreal with the
all-too-real. Taking his cues from Kafka, his prose shines a
dazzling light into the dark absurdities of Iraq’s recent past
and the torments of its countless refugees. The subject of this,
his second collection, is primarily trauma and the curious
strategies human beings adopt to process it (including, of course,
fiction). The result is a masterclass in metaphor – a new kind of
story-telling, forged in the crucible of war, and just as shocking.
Based on the short story by Hassan Blasim. Salim, an Iraqi refugee,
takes on a new identity In London after fleeing persecution in
Baghdad. He is picked up, and marries a wealthy older woman, who
enthusiastically coaches him in the bedroom for his forthcoming
citizenship test. But Carlos Fuentes finds that knowing the names
of all six of Henry VIII’s wives can neither satisfy his new wife
nor turn him into a “Britishman”. The nightmare of the violence
of his past catches up with him, and suddenly he is at the airport,
accompanied by a G4 security guard, waiting for a plane to take him
back to Iraq.
From hostage-video makers in Baghdad, to human trafficking in the
forests of Serbia, institutionalised paranoia in the Saddam years,
to the nightmares of an exile trying to embrace a new life in
Amsterdam... Blasim's stories present an uncompromising view of the
West's relationship with Iraq, spanning over twenty years and
taking in everything from the Iran-Iraq War through to the
Occupation, as well as offering a haunting critique of the post-war
refugee experience. Blending allegory with historical realism, and
subverting readers' expectations in an unflinching comedy of the
macabre, these stories manage to be both phantasmagoric and
shockingly real, light in touch yet steeped in personal nightmare.
For all their despair and darkness, though, what lingers more than
the haunting images of war, or the insanity of those who would
benefit from it, is the spirit of defiance, the indefatigable
courage of those few characters keeping faith with what remains of
human intelligence. Together these stories represent the first
major literary work about the war from an Iraqi perspective.
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God 99 (Paperback)
Hassan Blasim; Translated by Jonathan Wright
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R318
R291
Discovery Miles 2 910
Save R27 (8%)
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Ships in 9 - 15 working days
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Chess-playing people-traffickers, suicidal photographers, absurdist
sound sculptors, cat-loving rebel sympathisers, murderous
storytellers... The characters in Hassan Blasim's debut novel are
not the inventions of a wild imagination, but real-life refugees
and people whose lives have been devastated by war. Interviewed by
Hassan Owl, an aspiring Iraq-born writer, they become the subjects
of an online art project, a blog that blurs the boundaries between
fiction and autobiography, reportage and the novel. Framed by an
email correspondence with the mysterious Alia, a translator of the
Romanian philosopher Emil Cioran, the project leads us through the
bars, brothels and bathhouses of Hassan's past and present in a
journey of trauma, violence, identity and desire. Taking its
conceit from the Islamic tradition that says God has 99 names, the
novel trains a kaleidoscopic lens on the multiplicity of
experiences behind Europe's so-called 'migrant crisis', and asks
how those who have been displaced might find themselves again.
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