blasim & mckie
by uzwi
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.
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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.