Saadawi conjures a monster in this macabre comedy that requires human flesh to thrive - first from the underbelly of society, then from anybody in its path.
Hadi, a trash merchant, gathers human body parts and puts them together to construct a corpse in the desolate streets of US-occupied Baghdad. His stated objective is for the government to acknowledge the pieces as humans and provide them with proper burial. When the corpse goes missing, a wave of weird murders sweeps the city, and stories of a horrifying-looking criminal who, despite being shot, cannot be killed flood in.
Despite the dark elements to this concept, Saadawi handles with a light touch. He creates some fantastic characters and captures with white-knuckle horror and black humour the surreal reality of a city at war.

I included this excellent book in my Best Middle Eastern Books to read.
https://quizlit.org/10-best-middle-eastern-books ( )

Interesting if never quite compelling, Frankenstein in Baghdad is a loose riff on the eponymous Gothic novel that unfolds in contemporary Baghdad. Here, Hadi the Junk Dealer starts to collect the parts of human bodies which litter the city, trying to create a whole body that can be properly laid to rest. But by chance, the soul of a young man killed in a bomb attack ends up animating the corpse—and the bulletproof Whatsitsname is soon bound on revenge. Ahmed Saadawai's novel has flashes of dark satirical humour, but mostly I found this a sombre read. The large cast of POV characters provides many different perspectives on what's happening—are the events we're reading about "actually" happening or are they a hallucination? a hoax?—but while I found some of them engaging, many of them were difficult to keep track of and generally fairly passive/reactive to what's going on around them. Which may be an understandable reaction to life in the kind of circumstances described here! But it made for a less propulsive read. ( )

Unfortunately this book wasn't really for me. The detached third-person omniscient writing style drifts between numerous characters, none of whom are particularly appealing. All the characters mostly just sort of have things happen to them, and feel vaguely dissatisfied about it. Time also sort of drifts around, with events often being told out of order for no particular reason. And the main plot sort of wanders off, never to return to that POV again. ( )

This should be a 3.75, but I don't want to give it a 3.5. So, it's different, it's interesting, but it's not compelling. I wavers between dream-like, parable and child-like, and the end, well is there an end? It just finishes really, with no real ending. ( )

Saadawi's layering of the beginning makes for a slow dive into the traumatized city of Baghdad and its struggling inhabitants, but in a fashion that lures the reader deeper and deeper into what feels like the set-up for a realistic horror novel. When things go the way of Frankenstein, turning sideways into a puzzle of characters, bodies, and victimhood, the picture becomes both clearer and more labyrinthine. Paying homage to classics such as Frankenstein and Dracula also add further layers for the readers who've read the classics, and while this may be a slow horror read in comparison to other contemporary horror novels, I'm glad to have made my way through it. ( )