It is perhaps the latest literary tribute to Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein. It has certainly been the most talked-about by English-speaking readers during the last month. “Frankenstein in Baghdad” by Iraki author Ahmed Saadawi has been published in the Usa in Jonathan Wright’s translation some twenty days ago. And in these weeks it has collected a huge amount of good reviews. Dwight Garner on the “New York Times” has described it as “Funny and horrifying in a near-perfect admixture”. Sarah Perry on “The Guardian” describes it as «an acute portrait of Middle Eastern sectarianism and geopolitical ineptitude, an absurdist morality fable, and a horror fantasy». And Ursula Lindsay in the “New Yorker” has added that «Saadawi sets out a reality that is so gothic in its details that, when the novel makes a turn to the supernatural, it barely shocks». After just a few days rumors of a Hollywood adaptation have spread, linking the production of the movie-to-be to George Lucas’ name. But what’s so special about this book?

“Frankenstein in Baghdad” is set in the capital of Iraq in the years 2005-2006, during the American invasion, a time of turmoils and terrorism that preceded the start of the civil war. The book tells the story of Hadi, a junk peddler who, after having lost in a terrorist attack a very close friend, sets out to collect body parts of victims of bombs and stitches them together to build a complete corpse. But after a new attack, the soul of a victim enters the corpse, and the creature comes to life. This new Frankenstein starts to move around in Baghdad killing bad men: he looks for the people responsible for the attacks that killed those who gave him the parts of his body. But a problem arises. When an attack is revenged, the part of the monster’s body related to that killing decays and falls out. And this brings the monster to kill innocent people, only to get the new body-parts he needs.

Readers around the world have known “Frankenstein in Baghdad” for some years now. Published in Arabic in 2013, after winning the most important Prize for Arabic fiction in 2014, Saadawi’s book has been translated in many languages: French, Italian, Chinese, Turkish, Hebrew,  bosnian... Arabic language scholars working in Great Britain and in international universities have already published papers on this subject. Bushr Juhi Jani from  the University of Sheffield, UK, has linked Saadawi’s monster to Julia Kristeva’s “Abject”, that is moral pollution or “death infecting life”. Hani Elayyan from the American University of the Middle East, based in Kuwait, traces the book’s inspiration back to Judith Butler’s idea of the special terror that stems from «a “precarious life” in which sudden and violent death is always looming». 

Everywhere the book has received very good reviews, and even prizes: the Grand Prix de l'Imaginaire in France, while in Italy a mention has gone to Barbara Teresi’s translation for e/o  – maybe the most famous Italian publisher, nowadays, being the publisher of Elena Ferrante’s novels, and the sole guardian to her identity. 

Ahmed Saadawi, the book’s author, was born in 1973 in Baghdad, where he still lives. He works as a freelance journalist and author of TV documentaries, but has also published short stories and three novels: “Frankenstein” is his latest. He was  living in Baghdad, then, in the years his book’s story is set in. This explains why the chronicles he tells are so vivid, and so dramatic. When Saadawi writes that “never in your life will you smell» anything like the smell of smoke, plastic car seats and bodies burnt up together in an explosion, and that «you will remember it as long as you live», the reader can feel that he is not inventing, that he is talking about something he has experienced in real life. 

Western readers have been attracted by the book thanks to its mixture of the most realistic war chronicle and the tribute to the highest gothic literature, passing through quotations of all sorts of Hollywood monster movies. But the aim of this paper is to hint at some Arabic sources that give the book its unique depth and flavour.

The first Arabic literary source is hidden in the very birth of Saadawi's monster. As we all know, Mary Shelley's Frankenstein stems from a young doctor's desire to be able to dominate life – and this is the reason of the book's subtitle, “The Modern Prometheus”. This background remains the same in all the most famous “variations on the theme” of Mary Shelley's monster. But not in  Saadawi's book. Hadi, the creature's “father”, never hopes to snatch the power of life away from God. On the contrary, he wants to give «a proper burial» to corpses so shattered that they would not «be respected like other dead people» but «would be treated as rubbish».

This pious desire takes us straight back to one of the most famous Arabic tales: “Ali Baba and the 40 Thieves”, from the “Arabian Nights”. The first man to enter the enchanted cave, Ali Baba’s greedy brother Kasim, is discovered by the thieves, killed and cut into four pieces. His wife and his brother, with the help of the clever slave Morgiana, rescue the body parts from the cave and have them sewn together by a blindfolded tailor so that they can give hima  a proper funeral.

Saadawi's monster’s story is far more complicated than this. His body is made up of parts of different corpses: since we are talking in Venice we could define it as a sort of horrible “arlecchino”. Arlequin’s dress is made up of scrap of different fabric. In an interview, Saadawi has explained that the pieces of the monster’s body have different colours because he wanted to show that they come from victims of the different ethnic groups of iraq. He has traced back this idea to the very inspiration of the book, that came to him «in a cold room of a hospital». «I found there a man crying because his brother had died in a big attack», Saadawi said. «Families came to identify bodies of their relatives but this man couldn’t find his brother. A male nurse told him to check in another room, reserved for body parts and flesh. He was asked to collect what he could find to compose an entire corpse».

This is the horrible reality from which the book starts. But the passage from reality to novel is marked by many steps and many literary reminiscences and movie references. When the reader meets Hadi, he is loitering in a blood-shed street after a terrorist attack, looking for the final part for his horror puzzle: «He wanted a single nose, alone and neglected, that no one else wanted». Bushra Jahi Jani has already linked this to the famous Nikolai Gogol’s short story. As we all know, Gogol’s “Nose” has been considered a phallic symbol. Since Saadawi seems to know all the Hollywood movies about Frankenstein, the link between Gogol's nose and Saadawi’s monster can be traced back to a famous joke in “Young Frankenstein”. When Doctor Frankenstein tells his assistant Inga that «For the experiment to be a success, all of the body parts must be enlarged», she comments: «His veins, his feet, his hands, his organs vould all have to be increased in size». Then she looks schocked and adds, in pseudo-German: «He vould have an enormous schwanzstucker».

Saadawi's Frankenstein is different in many ways from Mary Shelley's. In the gothic novel the complex feeling that links Victor to “his” monster is often shown as if they where in some horrible way father and son while Saadawi's monster can barely be considered as Hadi’s son. But on the contrary, as Hani Elayyan has noticed, this Arabic Frankenstein has a mother: a bereft woman who “adopts” him as her son as soon as she sees him. After 20 years, Elishua is still hoping for her son Daniel to come back from the Iraqi-Iranian war. She is considered mad but at the same time she is thought to be blessed, and to protect the streets near her house from terrorists’ attacks. She is a Christian woman and lives next to the Jewish ruins: a symbol of the complexity of Iraqi society. When the monster seeks refuge in her house, she is sure that Daniel has come back. She cures his wounds, she feeds him, she dresses him with her son’s clothing. She is not afraid of him, she is not shocked that he looks weird or silent, because so many soldiers have come back from war either horribly shocked or shockingly changed. Elishua is one of the most important characters in the book, and she inspires some of its most beautiful pages.

Mary Shelley's monster becomes a killer because he hates his creator: he kills Victor Frankenstein's brother and wife because he wants to hurt him. In contrast to what we read on “The Economist”s book’s review, Saadawi's monster has no similar score to settle with Hadi. He becomes a killer too, but one of a different kind: he is a killer with a mission, taking revenge for the people whom he borrowed body parts from. He only starts to kill innocent people when he has to hunt for the body parts that fall off. In doing this, Saadawi’s monster crosses different themes popular with Hollywood movies. He starts as a member of the “Zombie Franchise”, that as Indian scholar K.S. Arsch has noticed is deeply indebted with  Mary Shelley’s novel. He soon becomes a superhero bringing justice where law and order cannot reach, a subject quite popular in American movies: maybe the latest film on this theme is “Seeking Justice” with Nicholas Cage, in 2011. Iraqi police start investigating this serial killer, until a strange departement takes the lead on the case: full of fortune-tellers, necromancers and magicians, this Special Unit takes “Men in Black” alien-hunting strategies to a fantasy level. And when finally the monster finds himself forced to kill innocent people in order to stay alive, he becomes a member of the popular “Vampire Franchise” too.

All this makes Saadawi’s Frankenstein a very contemporary monster. In fact the author doesn't take as a model Mary Shelley’s novel, but the entire “Frankenstein imaginarium” formed by two hundreds years of novels, movies, cartoons... Mary Shelley's book is actually never mentioned: but there’s a reference to «the Al Pacino movie», and the title of this 1994 movie is “Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein”. The Iraqian monster is only called Frankenstein in the final pages of the book: before that it is called “shesma”, the name Hadi gives him, an Arabic word meaning “Whatsitsname”.

Another important difference between model and homage is in how life gets into the monster. Mary Shelley was inspired by electricity – a theme that has been studied by many authors, lately by Kathryn Harkup in her essay “Making the monster” and in Italy by Marco Ciardi and Pier Luigi Gaspa in a book published just a few days ago by Carocci. We would expect Saadawi to turn to modern technologies or to science fiction. On the contrary, he gets back to Arabic traditions. In exergo, the author quotes a Christian tale about Saint George, Elishua’s favourite Saint: George is chained to a wheel covered by swords so that his body is slain, but the Lord gets the pieces together, heals the body and resurrects the saint.

But this is a miracle, an exception. Ordinary people in the arabic world have a simpler fate. In one of the first chapters of the book, the displaced soul that will end up in the monster’s body wanders in the city. In Najaf’s cemetery the soul meets a young man sitting on a tombstone. This young man's portrait is so vivid that it definitely seems a life study, a homage to an author's friend. The young man tells the confused soul that, after the body is dead, souls are free to wander for some days, until the body begins to decompose. And if they don’t have a body to go back to, «it’s a mess». So the soul begins wandering again, until he finds Hadi’s creature. «He took possession of that corpse», Saadawi writes , «because presumably it was a body without a soul, just like he was a soul without a body».

Other links to the Arabic tradition are not so evident, but they are sure to be there: I am looking forward to Arabic literature scholars to investigate them. Then we will have a clear view of the unique mixture of Western and Arabic themes that make this book so fascinating. We must remember that in the “Arabian Nights” there is a continuous coming and going from the world of the dead and back. It is difficult for a Western reader to imagine how strong the influence of these tales is. In Middle Eastern cities they are still told in marketplaces by story tellers: and Hadi is himself a storyteller. He tells stories to the customers in ‘Aziz the Egyptian’s cafe. He is a very successful storyteller, and he knows how to make his stories more compelling by adding realistic details. But then one day he starts to tell about his “shesma”, and the story of this bloodthirsty “Frankenstein in Baghdad” is so strange that no customer in the cafe can believe it is true.