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Goddess in the Stacks (553 KP) rated Frankenstein in Baghdad in Books

Jul 23, 2019

This book won at least two awards; the International Prize for Arabic Fiction and France's Grand Prize for Fantasy, and the author had previously been named one of the 39 best Arab authors under the age of 39. I picked it up to read for the Year of the Asian Reading Challenge, since the Middle East is all-too-often neglected in regional groupings like that. People don't think of it as Europe or Asia. I also try to read translated books on occasion, in an effort to diversify my reading. So this hit a number of my interests - I wish I had actually liked the book more!

It's an interesting retelling of Frankenstein - which I haven't actually read, and now feel like I really should. But it bounces around between several viewpoints. It's not too many to keep straight, but it's definitely too many to truly care about. And it suffers from an unreliable narrator - it's written as several stories told to an author from multiple people that he's woven together into a single narrative, and while he does that well, it suffers from contradictions between how different characters recall things, scenes that don't play a part in furthering the plot but the characters thought they were important, and no authoritative "this is what REALLY happened" to draw it all together.

And I very much dislike unreliable narrators, so that alone is enough to make me dislike the book. If you like ambiguous narratives and vigilante stories, however, you might enjoy this, and the writing style itself was quite engrossing.

You can find all my reviews and more at http://goddessinthestacks.com