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.
The Madman of Freedom Square
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'Perhaps the best writer of Arabic fiction alive...' --The Guardian
'The news machine has shifted its attention to Afghanistan, and Iraqis are being left to fend for themselves. Blasim's collection reminds us that anything could still happen there. Iraq's story must still be told, and we need Iraqi voices like Blasim's to tell it.' --Intelligent Life
'Blasim pitches everyday horror into something almost gothic... his taste for the surreal can be Gogol-like.' --The Independent
'The news machine has shifted its attention to Afghanistan, and Iraqis are being left to fend for themselves. Blasim's collection reminds us that anything could still happen there. Iraq's story must still be told, and we need Iraqi voices like Blasim's to tell it.' --Intelligent Life
'Blasim pitches everyday horror into something almost gothic... his taste for the surreal can be Gogol-like.' --The Independent
About the Author
Hassan Blasim is a poet, filmmaker and short story writer. Born in Baghdad in 1973, he studied at the city's Academy of Cinematic Arts, where two of his films Gardenia (screenplay & director) and White Clay (screenplay) won the Academy's Festival Award for Best Work in their respective years. In 1998 he left Baghdad for Sulaymaniya (Iraqi Kurdistan), where he continued to make films, including the feature-length drama Wounded Camera, under the pseudonym Ouazad Osman, fearing for his family back in Baghdad under the Hussein dictatorship. In 2004, he moved to Finland, where he has since made numerous short films and documentaries for Finnish television. His stories have previously been published on www.iraqstory.com and his essays on cinema have featured in Cinema Booklets (Emirates Cultural Foundation). His first short story in English appeared in Madinah: City Stories from the Middle East (Comma 2008). This is his first book.
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By Paul Bowes
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Format:Paperback
'The Madman of Freedom Square', a first book, is a collection of eleven brief short stories by the writer and film-maker Hassan Blasim, an Iraqi by birth and now resident of Finland. It appeared in English in 2009: the stories had for the most part previously appeared in Arabic online. The first story appeared in English in 2008 in Prospect magazine and in a previous collection from Comma, 'Madinah'.
Blasim's subject is Iraq and its people in the years of Saddam Hussain and the subsequent American Occupation. The extraordinary events of those years render straightforward story-telling inadequate. Blasim's response has been to create a style that draws on the traditional resources of myth, legend and the dream narrative as much as modern reportage, and that fuses an almost Gothic sensibility with a commitment to truth.
The result is deeply unsettling for optimists and believers in the inherent nobility of man. Under horrendous pressures from external violence and culturally-imposed strictures, individuals in these stories crack time and again, regressing according to temperament and circumstance in the face of an almost surreal reality into states of infantile cruelty, superstitious dread and madness.
For the western reader, there will be echoes of Kafka and Borges, but also of Poe, and of De Sade's unflinching gaze on human depravity. In sum, these stories are a powerful and quite unanticipated artistic response to unbearable facts: a memorable and disquieting experience.
98 pages, not 256 pages as stated.
Blasim's subject is Iraq and its people in the years of Saddam Hussain and the subsequent American Occupation. The extraordinary events of those years render straightforward story-telling inadequate. Blasim's response has been to create a style that draws on the traditional resources of myth, legend and the dream narrative as much as modern reportage, and that fuses an almost Gothic sensibility with a commitment to truth.
The result is deeply unsettling for optimists and believers in the inherent nobility of man. Under horrendous pressures from external violence and culturally-imposed strictures, individuals in these stories crack time and again, regressing according to temperament and circumstance in the face of an almost surreal reality into states of infantile cruelty, superstitious dread and madness.
For the western reader, there will be echoes of Kafka and Borges, but also of Poe, and of De Sade's unflinching gaze on human depravity. In sum, these stories are a powerful and quite unanticipated artistic response to unbearable facts: a memorable and disquieting experience.
98 pages, not 256 pages as stated.
Format:Kindle Edition|Amazon Verified Purchase
One of the foremost Iraqi writers of his time delivers his debut collection translated into English. By turns harrowing, beautiful, disturbing and inspiring, it is utterly unlike anything you have read before from an Arabic writer. Entering territory previously the realm of Western experimental / transgressive writers such as Ballard, Kafka or Burroughs, Blasim creates a compelling, deeply humanist narrative of the Iraq war, its aftermath and its historical background, filtered through the lens of brutal, intense imagery and an allegorical phantasmagoria of nightmare worlds and fractured realities.
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1 of 1 people found the following review helpful
4.0 out of 5 stars
Bold, brutal words
1 Aug 2011
By nlo
- Published on Amazon.com
Format:Paperback
I was looking for a book that was written about occupation Iraq and I found this one. It is an amazing gem of stories and I would recommend it to anyone--even if they are not interested in the Middle East. Most of the stories were merely good; yet all of them managed to paint a haunting landscape that lingers even after the book is closed. This ability to paint the absurd and violent was masterful and revealing of the psychology of any peoples who have been through such trauma. Read this book if you get the chance.
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