Qunfuz

This review was first published at the New Arab.

The narrator of one of the stories in Hassan Blasim’s “Sololand” dreams that he’s written a story in colloquial Iraqi Arabic rather than in standard fusha. He begins reading it to a “hall full of writers, critics and poets … all smoking and glaring at each other.” As soon as he finishes the first line, which repeats a vulgar but realistic Iraqi proverb, “the first shoe hit me from the front row, and then more shoes came thick and fast like a swarm of locusts.”

This reminds me of my own experience attending a literary festival in Erbil, Iraqi Kurdistan, back in 2011. I didn’t commit the sin of reading out a story written in aamiya, but I did make the comparable faux pas of praising Hassan Blasim’s writing to a hall full of Iraqi literary figures. I repeated what I’d written in the Guardian, that Blasim was perhaps the best writer of Arabic fiction alive. This didn’t provoke actual shoes, but it did result in fuming outrage and several angry ripostes. Blasim uses bad language, they said. He is vulgar. He concentrates on topics that are unsuitable for literature.

O but that’s what used to be said about James Joyce, another iconoclast at work in a period of social and cultural turmoil. Those working to find new ways of expressing new realities will inevitably offend sensibilities and step on people’s toes, especially in a country with as many taboos as Iraq.

Iraq is the country that Blasim escaped. His own toes were trodden on in the process. Some of his fingers, to be precise, were cut off during the journey, which took him over the mountains into Iran, then through Turkey and various European countries, working unregistered jobs in dangerous conditions to pay his way. Echoes of the journey can be heard in “The Truck to Berlin”, a horror story from his first collection, “The Madman of Freedom Square” (2009).

That was the collection which elicited my praise, and which I often still give as a present. If the question is: How to write about war, when war provides truths every day that are so much stranger and more macabre than fiction? Then this book answers the question with an inimitable blend of surrealism, cynicism and black humour. (Ahmad al-Saadawi’s very up-to-date fable “Frankenstein in Baghdad” offers another very different answer, and the late Syrian novelist Khaled Khalifa, in “Death is Hard Work”, by far his most pared-down novel, offers yet another.)

“Sololand”, Blasim’s latest collection, is a further high achievement. Two of the three stories offer visions of the kind of social breakdown that forces Iraqis to flee their country, and sandwiched between them another story offers a similarly dark picture of the situations in which they arrive in their supposed lands of refuge.