The Book of Collateral Damage
SynopsisPlot
The celebrated author Sinan Antoon’s fourth and most sophisticated novel follows Nameer, a young Iraqi scholar earning his doctorate at Harvard, who is hired by filmmakers to help document the devastation of the 2003 invasion of Iraq. During the excursion, Nameer ventures to al-Mutanabbi street in Baghdad, famed for its bookshops, and encounters Wadood, an eccentric bookseller who is trying to catalogue everything destroyed by war, from objects, buildings, books and manuscripts, flora and fauna, to humans.
Story
About this book
Sinan Antoon's fourth novel centers on Nameer, a young Iraqi doctoral student at Harvard who is recruited by a film crew to help document the destruction left by the 2003 invasion of Iraq. The assignment takes him back to Baghdad, where he walks the streets of a city shaped by occupation and loss. On al-Mutanabbi Street, long known as the heart of Baghdad's book trade, Nameer meets Wadood, a bookseller engaged in an unusual and consuming project.
Wadood is attempting to compile an inventory of everything the war has destroyed. His catalogue spans objects, buildings, books, manuscripts, plant and animal life, and human beings. The scale of the task is enormous and perhaps impossible, but Wadood pursues it with stubborn dedication. Through the encounter between these two figures, the novel examines how war erases not only people and places but also the records and artifacts that hold a culture's memory. Nameer, living between the United States and Iraq, carries the tension of distance from a homeland undergoing irreversible change.
The story is set partly in Cambridge, Massachusetts, and partly in Baghdad. Antoon, himself an Iraqi-born writer and scholar, draws on that geographic split to frame questions about documentation, responsibility, and what can be preserved when destruction operates on such a broad scale.
