Frankenstein in Baghdad

The story is interesting enough but it’s a bit slow moving in some parts. Not a book I’d discourage but not one I’d recommend either.

This is a very beautiful and interesting book. You can see the horror that people of this Country have lived but with one kind of hope. At the same time you can approach some political topics and appreciate their ancient culture in a nearest way!!!. I recommend it.

Gift for my boyfriend who is an international affairs aficionado. He loved it!

Late and completely wrecked by rain with the bonus of having to return it and reorder it if I wanted it again.

Browsing through the Man Booker International Prize 2018 longlist this novel appealed to me because of its setting, Baghdad, and political context, U.S. occupied Iraq in 2005. I can't say that I much enjoyed it despite its good-natured tone & agree with some other comments here that the novel peters out towards the end. I also had problems with some of the narrative devices: the novel is largely written in the third person yet towards the end the reader is addressed by 'the writer' in the first person to no useful effect, it just unnecessarily over-complicates the narrative and erodes the focus, as does the half-hearted framing device of a U.S. investigation into the 'Tracking and Pursuit Department'; the point of view too often randomly shifts to too many different characters, which had the effect of making them slightly cartoonish & too thinly drawn; the political/moral points are laboured, made slightly trite, as in the monster's ('Whaitsname') testimony where the creature's symbolic meaning is spelled out in upper case - there's not much subtlety in the writing or in the satire. Or put another way, I thought it was all a bit of a mess. Perhaps it was my expectation, hoping for an Iraqi Elias Khoury crossed with early Tom Sharpe, which made this novel such a letdown and made me wonder what on earth it was doing on the longlist alongside works by Laszlo Krasznahorkai, Olga Tokarczuk and Antonio Muñoz Molina.