Since our botched invasion and futile occupation of Iraq, there have been several excellent accounts of this costly, deadly debacle —unfortunately all written from the perspective of American and other Western-based writers. Finally, we have the opportunity to see these years of terror and death through the eyes of an Iraqi with Hassan Blasim’s bold collection of stories in The Corpse Exhibition. Blasim was born in Baghdad in 1973 and studied at the Baghdad Academy of Cinematic Arts before becoming a vocal critic of Saddam Hussein’s regime. The author was forced into exile in Finland after the U.S. invasion of Iraq in 2004. The winner of countless awards, he is co-editor of iraqstory.com.
The 14 tales in The Corpse Exhibition are shockingly brutal, violent and haunting. Blasim, hailed as one of the best living writers of Arabic fiction, lives up to this mantle with these short, shocking stories that will stay with you long after you’ve finished reading them. The tales are, at times, ghost-filled and hallucinatory, like long-fevered nightmares. The collection’s opener, which gives the book its title, is simply a monologue by an arrogant leader addressing hired killers. He instructs them to display the corpses of their victims creatively around the city. Mixing in magic realism and a touch of gallows humor, Blasim’s stories are each full of unflinching honesty and unrelenting horror, and his courage as a writer is astounding.
Through Blasim’s prose, the dead cry out for a just reckoning for their terribly shortened lives. The author represents the silenced voices of the multitudes: the bombed-out and blasted, their flesh torn apart in the carnage brought on by the U.S. attacks. Their voices scream out to us on every page and their stories are more shocking than any you’ll read in years. The Corpse Exhibition is a long-awaited and vital part of our sad history.
Grade: A+
This article appears in May 14-20, 2014.
