The Corpse Exhibition: And Other Stories of Iraq
These 14 surrealistic stories are all about Iraq’s endless wars. Americans are mostly off-stage, but “The Madman of Freedom Square” is a sly, dark allegory of their arrival and sometimes miraculous effect. Many characters are terrorists, as in “The Killers and the Compass,” in which a veteran terrorist explains the divinity one acquires in the disposition of extreme violence—not a Muslim divinity but a personal one rising from inspiring terror and killing. The title story is all about the fine art of displaying corpses in public places. The matter-of-fact tone of its first-person narrator, a sort of instructor, suggests Kafka’s “A Report to an Academy.” But one thinks of Borges in perhaps the best entry, “The Nightmares of Carlos Fuentes,” about an Iraqi immigrant to Holland who’s determined to put his country’s evils behind him, even to the point that he pretends to be Mexican. An interesting choice for larger fiction collections and perhaps base libraries. --John Mort