Sinan Antoon

My third book by Antoon (and his first, tellingly) and I am sorry to say the first one that didn’t really impress me. The title refers to the practice of using diacritical dots in Arabic to make meaning clear because the same letters can mean (very) different things without those dots. The frame story is that a manuscript without dots in discovered in Iraqi security headquarters in 1989 and a memo asks for “qualified personnel…to insert the diacritics and write a brief report of the manuscript’s contents.” The vast majority of the book comprises the translated/interpreted manuscript. Occasional footnotes by the transcriber note possible double meanings but I found them to be very few (given the introduction’s explanation) and mostly reliant on wordplay. Recognizing that this kind of language-bound issue is particularly difficult to present in any translation, I cannot help but wonder how much more powerful or moving the original is. I found the English text limp, at least with regard to the point Antoon seems to be making about language as a means of interpreting our lives. The manuscript is written by a dissident student living in Baghdad under Saddam Hussein; he alternates incidents from his past, his present life in prison, and hoped-for reunions with his grandmother and girlfriend. What begins promisingly devolves into repetitive and increasingly incomprehensible material. Antoon has conceived a wonderful premise that, I suspect, is almost impossible to carry off in another language and while I have no way to know how successful it is in Arabic, I found it dismayingly unimpressive in English.… (mais)

Brilliant. Written in 2013 about a young man coming of age in wartime Iraq. His father, like generations before him, washes corpses so that they may be buried in accordance with the precepts of their Shi’ite faith. It is a lengthy, time-consuming process and Antoon does a great job explaining and showing both the process and its deep meaning. The protagonist, Jawad, wants none of this; he wants to become a sculptor and the book is his story. Not a lot “happens,” but the characters are indelible, the story, heart-breaking. I thought the ending a bit weak, but the writing is excellent and I highly recommend it.… (mais)

Another impressive work. I read The Corpse Washer last year and thought it strikingly well done. This is a longer work: more complex, more nuanced, but again quite thought-provoking. Nameer, an Iraqi earning a Ph.D. at Harvard, is hired by documentary filmmakers to help them chronicle the devastation caused by the 2003 invasion of Iraq. While there, he meets an eccentric bookseller who is cataloging everything destroyed by war: objects, memories, buildings, manuscripts, animals, flowers and, of course, humans. Nameer becomes obsessed with the catalogue and the project, even as Antoon interweaves Nameer’s life as a scholar in the U.S. The text contains several dozen “colloquys,” meditations of people and of animate and inanimate objects—virtually all of which are provocative and even inspiring. Ultimately, the book is an innovative set of reflections on the cost of war and the function of memory. Strongly recommend.… (mais)