商品簡介
Informed by firsthand experience on the battlefronts of Iraq and Syria, Abdoh captures the horror, confusion, and absurdity of combat from a seldom-glimpsed perspective that expands our understanding of the war novel.
"Out of Mesopotamia is a brutally realistic look at war and love and fear and everything else that humans do. The writing is impossibly good. The characters aren't characters at all--they seem to have emerged fully formed from the blood-soaked soil of Syria and Iraq. And they rise up to live out a story that is as old as history and yet somehow could only have happened today. I'm stunned by how good this book is."
--Sebastian Junger, author of Tribe: On Homecoming and Belonging
"Out of Mesopotamia is an extraordinary novel that captures the ambiguous and often contradictory nature of contemporary conflict as well as anything I've ever read. Herein you will find the story of Saleh, a journalist trying to keep his footing at the intersection of life and death, bitterness and absurdity, and the sacred and the pointless that is the resistance to Islamic State in northern Iraq. His voice is as honest and direct as any you are likely to encounter on the subject of war in the modern world, and I for one will be thinking of him for a long, long time to come."
--Kevin Powers, author of The Yellow Birds
"Out of Mesopotamia is the novel every American should be reading next. A novel so ambitious and exciting and impressive that comparisons fall short. The Executioner's Song and A Tomb for Boris Davidovich come to mind--that's the level of brilliance I'm talking about. Salar Abdoh writes page after page of kinetic fiction. To say this book is full of truth is to shortchange it; this is a book full of art."
--Victor LaValle, author of The Changeling
"A man finds himself in a war where nobody really knows what is right or what is wrong. But one thing is certain: if you step into this war, you'd better be at peace with yourself. Abdoh's words can touch everyone because they come from somewhere essential."
--Jean-Claude Carrière, Academy Award--winning author/screenwriter
Saleh, the narrator of Out of Mesopotamia, is a middle-aged Iranian journalist who moonlights as a writer for one of Iran's most popular TV shows but cannot keep himself away from the front lines in neighboring Iraq and Syria. There, the fight against the Islamic State is a proxy war, an existential battle, a declaration of faith, and, for some, a passing weekend affair.
After weeks spent dodging RPGs, witnessing acts of savagery and stupidity, Saleh returns to his civilian life of Tehran bookstore readings and trendy art openings and finds it to be an unbearably dislocating experience. Pursued by the woman who broke his heart, his official handler from state security (who wants him for questioning over a suspicious volume of Proust), and the screenwriters with whom he is supposed to be collaborating, Saleh has reason to flee again from everyday life--but not necessarily to discard it. Surrounded by men whose willingness to achieve martyrdom both fascinates and appalls him, Saleh struggles to make sense of himself and the turmoil that surrounds him.
An unprecedented glimpse into the fight against the Islamic State from a Middle Eastern perspective, Out of Mesopotamia follows in the tradition of the Western "canon" of martial writers--from Hemingway and Orwell to Tim O'Brien and Kevin Powers--but then subverts and expands upon the genre and form before completely blowing it apart. Drawing from his firsthand experience of being embedded with Shia militias on the ground in Iraq and Syria, Abdoh gives agency to the voiceless while offering a meditation on war that is moving, humane, darkly funny, and resonantly true.
