The Corpse Exhibition
SynopsisPlot
The Corpse Exhibition shows us the war as we have never seen it before. Here is a world not only of soldiers and assassins, hostages and car bombers, refugees and terrorists, but also of madmen and prophets, angels and djinni, sorcerers and spirits. Blending shocking realism with flights of fantasy, The Corpse Exhibition offers us a pageant of horrors, as haunting as the photos of Abu Ghraib and as difficult to look away from, but shot through with a gallows humor that yields an unflinching comedy of the macabre. Gripping and hallucinatory, this is a new kind of storytelling forged in the crucible of war.
Story
About this book
Hassan Blasim's short story collection presents the Iraq War through the eyes of an Iraqi writer. The stories move between documented reality and surreal invention, placing soldiers, refugees, and car bombers alongside prophets, djinni, and sorcerers. Blasim does not separate these registers neatly. A story may begin in a recognizable Baghdad street and shift without warning into hallucination or myth, leaving the reader uncertain where observed fact ends and dark fantasy begins.
Violence in these pages is frequent and direct, but Blasim treats it with a dry, bitter humor rather than spectacle. The title story follows an instructor who teaches the art of displaying corpses for maximum public shock, a premise that sits uncomfortably close to the images that emerged from Abu Ghraib and from everyday bombings reported during the occupation years. Other stories follow asylum seekers, smugglers, and people caught between militia factions, each narrative compressed and unsettling.
Blasim was born in Baghdad in 1973 and later settled in Finland. The Guardian described him as perhaps the best Arabic fiction writer alive. The collection was originally written in Arabic and translated into English by Jonathan Wright.
