Book Review; Frankenstein in Baghdad by Ahmed Saadawi

Earlier this month I read the novel Frankenstein in Baghdad by Ahmed Saadawi and today I'll post my review of the book.

Description from Goodreads

From the rubble-strewn streets of U.S.-occupied Baghdad, Hadi--a scavenger and an oddball fixture at a local café--collects human body parts and stitches them together to create a corpse. His goal, he claims, is for the government to recognize the parts as people and to give them proper burial. But when the corpse goes missing, a wave of eerie murders sweeps the city, and reports stream in of a horrendous-looking criminal who, though shot, cannot be killed. Hadi soon realizes he's created a monster, one that needs human flesh to survive--first from the guilty, and then from anyone in its path. A prizewinning novel by "Baghdad's new literary star" (The New York Times), Frankenstein in Baghdad captures with white-knuckle horror and black humor the surreal reality of contemporary Iraq.

My Thoughts on the Book

Frankenstein in Baghdad has a healthy dose of satire with a splash of horror. In a sense, the horror element that is the "monster" or the criminal, is as much a metaphor as anything else. This isn't a horror novel in the typical sense of the word, but an intelligent way of writing about/commenting the horrors of war and the US presence in Iraq, especially Baghdad.

It can be a bit confusing at times reading the book and following the narrative, as it zooms in on so many various characters, I struggled a bit at times while reading it, but overall I did enjoy reading Frankenstein in Baghdad. It's not a book for everyone though.