Book Review: Out of Mesopotamia by Salar Abdoh

´A century had passed. Yet not a lot was different in this landscape. We were still fighting the same fight´. 

I read a lot and (almost) everything but I rarely read such intellectually troubling books like Out of Mesopotamia by Salar Abdoh. I read and write a lot about contemporary authors based in Iran or writing about Iran, in translation, but very often the stories are following a relatively common thread: a mention of the Shah times, maybe some references to Tudeh - once the biggest Communist Party in the Middle East - a couple of chapters where the action takes place during the coup against Mossadegh, the hard life under the mullahs of all colours and orientations. All those elements are important and do make sense for the Western audience but for someone interested in diversity and complexity this redundance convinces me rather to take long breaks between books with a Persian/Iranian topic.

Out of Mesopotamia is nothing like that. It´s brutal novelty is troubling though. 

Saleh, the storyteller, is a middle aged Iranian journalist, writing for a popular TV show and random art reviews. Willingly he is embedded with the Iranian forces fighting ISIS in Syria and Iraq. ´What were we doing here? Vultures perched on Mesopotamia´s tired bones´. He is not a fanatic believer and none of his companions really are. ´Martyrdom was our shibboleth; we distinguished each other´s sincerity by the way someone talked too little or too much about it´. But everything has a price. ´Our vocation of martyrdom had prices and estimations, it seemed. The war too had turned into an auction. And the martyrs were the works being sold´. The families of those dying as martyrs are offered benefits and even a special social status. Most got a fair refund for the dead one. 

Saleh is not a rebel, he is a fish in the water when he is observing his comrades and also in Tehran, where he goes to art galleries or to cafés. He is also accepting the transition of his comrades from fully humans to just body parts. As a member of the Defenders of the Holy Places he is offered serious material for writing the script for a movie, but his idea is stolen by someone else. The woman he fancied - not loved, not even liked - married his boss at the newspaper. 

Their present life is underline by the curse of the 1919 Sykes-Picot Agreement, when UK and France, with the benediction of the Russian Empire and Italy, agreed secretly how to slice the dying Ottoman Empire. Maybe after all I have to accept as well the many curses of the Middle East random geographies. 

But more than the curses and the intellectual lowliness of Saleh, the very subject of the book is intellectually and morally challenging. There is no induced opinion about what and whom the reader should consider good and what bad. People are fighting one against the other, as they did for centuries. They do have families and their own stories and emotions and hopes. There is even one guy who is reading The Remembrance of All Things Past by Proust and engages in intellectual/literary conversations. 

In a landscape of conflictual memories and religious inimities, we the Westerners are rarely aware of in their smallest details. ´We were ruined and romantic at the same time. There was a reason that Lawrence of Arabia had gotten carried away with himself in these landscapes and wrote about it, as if he were writing about something divine´.

Should we be judgemental about the topic? Be in awe that such people are becoming literary characters? Consider of maybe diminishing the political responsibility of their commanders based on the induced accidents of history and geography and geopolitics? Condemn the cruelty of the war, any war? What about giving up any clear ideological stance and enjoy reading the story? Imagine that world and cities and cafés populated not by mystical djinns from story books translated for the taste of Western readers but by fighters coming back from work on the fields on two feet or in several pieces. 

Also, I don´t remember to have read any recent Iranian-based novel featuring a synagogue as a random part of the urban landscape. Just an observation.

Personally, I have doubts about the real meaning of embedding journalists. On one hand it may offer a kind of protection - not guaranteed though as happened in the case of the Pulitzer-winning journalist Danish Seddiqi - but obviously the sources of information the journalist is offered are largely biased. They are a kind of press trips for the war journalists. 

But maybe, as in life, it is much appreciated to stop judging and just listen to the story? Are we moral beings enough when we don´t use our moral compass to compare and evaluate and dismiss? How are the cardinal points of this compass set up? etc. etc.

What a book...

Rating: 4 stars