I can´t stand books or authors or simple decision makers or simple readers who are just assuming - or trying to convince the others for very simplistic advertising reasons - how fantastic and blessed we are for reading and producing books. The books of the kind ´Reading Lolita in...´, particularly countries or cities where people may have an above the average level of literacy is misleading. Reducing the Middle East to ethnic conflicts and religious fanatics is a cartoonish take on a very active intellectual environment. The surprising thing may be that people there may risk their freedom and even their life for the sake of the written word, freedom and independent publishing.
Abbas Khider was born in Iraq, joined various anti-Saddam movements and went several times to prison before arriving to Germany where he studied, lives and writes. I had access to his 2020 book, Palast der Miserablen in audiobook format, narrated in the original German language, with emphasis and talent, by the actor Torsten Flassig.
The book has two parts, both accounted by the first-person storyteller Sham Hussein. At the beginning, Shams Hussein is a child moving from the South of Iraq to a suburb of Baghdad ´Saddam city´. His parents decided to move due of the war - Iraq-Iran war - and looking for better opportunities but it does not happen. They end up living near a garbage pile and Sham starts working from an early age. The new world is more hostile, impersonal and imbued with the personality cult of Saddam and his Baathist institutional repression. The children voice is very well represented.
Next, Sham discovers the fascination of books and reunites toghether with other literature lovers. But books do open minds and pushes the spirit to strive for freedom. A mind opened by the books cannot stand idle to the repression. And there are so many books that are read in Baghdad, among others Jacques Lacan and the structuralism. There is a long street in Baghdad, Mutanabbi (named after the 10th century Iraqi poet al-Mutanabbi), filled with bookstores. People love their books in the Middle East. Sham´s companions may recite better from Kafka and Pushkin than from the imams.
The background is always changing, but for the worse. There is the invasion of Kuwait, and after that Operation Desert Storm and people are moving or waiting to move, to Beirut or Jordan or anywhere where is less blood.
Palast der Miserablen is a novel of coming of age in the Iraq and Baghdad of the 1980s-1990s, with an omnipresent Saddam and tea houses and forbidden books. The ending is rough and dramatic and ends with a broken conscience.
I always experience a particular intellectual joy when I discover a new author as it opens a door towards a new world - geographically and intellectually. I do have another book by Khider, also in German, that I hope to read and review soon.
As for now, that´s how I am able to meet my Middle East, through words and books and imaginary worlds.
Rating: 3.5 stars
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