| Summary/Abstract |
American-Iraqi writer Sinan Antoon’s latest Arabic-language novel Fihris (2016), meaning ‘index’ or ‘catalogue’, is ostensibly the story of an academic, Namir, who returns to Baghdad as a translator for a documentary film company and Wadoud, an eccentric Baghdadi bookseller who is devoting his life to compiling a massive, unabridged history of Iraq’s 2003 war. Namir’s encounter with Wadoud in his shop leads to a representation of the Iraq’s macrocosmic polarities at every level. The leitmotifs of unending internal and external conflicting dualities amid the all-pervading insanity of war, violence and brutality form the backbone of a plotless story, whose language, style and structure is founded on themes of exile, memory, madness, time and trauma. This critique seeks to deconstruct the author’s creative tapestry of the two protagonists, their parallel worlds and their ultimate unification as one surreal spirit pointing to new hope for Iraq’s postwar future as one nation.
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