Hassan Blasim’s savagely comic stories of Iraq, The Madman of Freedom Square. It’s a short volume, 90-odd pages. At first you receive it with the kind of shocked applause you’d award a fairly transgressive stand-up. You’re quite elated. Then you stop reading it at bedtime. At his best Blasim produces a corrosive mixture of broken lyricism, bitter irony & hyper-realism which topples into the fantastic & the quotidian in the same reading moment. I can’t recommend highly enough “The Corpse Exhibition”, “The Market of Stories” or “The Nightmares of Carlos Fuentes”.
In other news, Andrew McKie promises a meditation on the littoral, fuelled by The City & the City & with connections to his 2007 report on the Alexandria Quartet.
Anyone who has used this post before will note that the last paragraph is now rather more accurate than it was. What can I say ? It was a fraught morning, August 21st, I felt like one of my own protagonists.