Beautiful writing… 

 

The line that for me sums up the feeling you get from this story and the writing style is: ‘What trauma? I don’t have any trauma.’ And as it falls drily and with candour off the lips of an Iranian war correspondent, the last image in his mind of starving children scavenging amid the rubble of a smouldering city and the leg of his friend—only the leg—he sees dangling from beneath the shroud as they carry away the body through the settling crumbs of cement, wiped from the skyline by another zealous martyr, this one line sums up a novel that turns the page on one trauma only to present the next in the same calm tone you might be asked what you take in your coffee. 

 

But that’s just it: the disconnect; the fantasy and the horror of it; the senselessness of war and continued war and man’s need to always be at war, when the children suffer starvation and loss and still manage to play footie between the landmines and the scattered buildings and bodies; the deep down necessity to focus on normal mundane daily activities when the heightened awareness, the adrenaline of wondering when the next person with nothing left to live for will walk through the door wearing a cardigan, which reminds you of your grandfather, packed with explosives. 

 

In stark relatable dialogue, Abdoh brings us to the fringes to sit behind the protective glass of a cosy Starbucks while we watch the horror unfold in the streets of Syria, Iraq, and Iran, as we scroll through stories on our phones and the reporters enchant us with rich, vibrant language that transports us… as we watch the tv series that will twist and turn the plot of facts into something more palatable to boost viewership… but oh, we feel like we can relate now, now we know, now we feel like we were there too, now we feel like we can also have an opinion…as we sip that skinny-decaf-latte-hold-the-whipped-cream... 

 

At times melancholic, often tragic, with bouts of hope strewn recklessly amid the preposterous, Abdoh draws a contrast  between modern Western life and freedoms, and the rigid yet raging realities of things we see every day on the news from the Middle East in a never-ending barrage of wars and rumours of wars. 

 

Such captivating writing. Reminiscent in bits of Hemingway in style and content, a war correspondent with a tendency towards being a philosopher of few words, making sudden bald pronouncements at the end of probing monologues. 

 

I smiled a lot while reading this, which worries me, since it was so so sad…