[orlok]

Originally Posted by orlok

I've nearly finished The Corpse Exhibition: And Other Stories of Iraq by Hassan Blasim. A disturbing glimpse into a very different world to the one I live in.

Originally Posted by WT Sharpe

Please review that one when you do finish. It sounds interesting.

As I said in an earlier post, I'm finding it difficult to provide a review for this book. The stories themselves are a strange mix of relatively straightforward episodes in the life of an Iraqi having lived through the Gulf War, brutal and disturbing, and other stories rooted in fantasy and magic - slight spoiler for one story, though you find out about the central plot device almost immediately:

Spoiler:

For example, a group of people who can make knives disappear just by concentrating on them.

The brutality of some of the stories is almost matter-of-fact, perhaps because for people living through these events the violence has become almost normalised, and is quite shocking because of that. The stories are often bleak and offer little in the way of hope or redemption, again possibly a by-product of the author's experiences.

It's difficult to say how well translated the stories are, but the writing is rich in parts, and simplistic in others. They are no doubt riddled with metaphors, some of which I got, many of which I'm sure I missed.

Ultimately, I found most of the stories a little unsatisfying in terms of the way they were ended - often abruptly, and almost never with any kind of real conclusion (but that's probably just my bias for mystery and crime stories with a clear wrap-up of the story talking).