Best Translated Book Nominees : Sinan Antoon's THE BOOK OF COLLATERAL DAMAGE (translated by Jonathan Wright)

Bearing the title that it does, The Book of Collateral Damage cannot be expected to be a lighthearted and cheery read, but let's take a moment to contemplate a list of the things author Sinan Antoon and translator Jonathan Wright will make you feel like crying about over its relatively short length: a fledgling bird, a carpet, a tree, a stamp album, a racehorse, a bedroom wall, an oud (an Arabian stringed instrument kind of like a lute), a cassette tape (oh my god did I blubber at The Colloquy of the Tape), a roll of film... plus, you know, various people, including a woman whose poetry survived thousands of years on a Mesopotamian tablet only to disappear in 2003 (probably ending up in Hobby Lobby's stolen hoard)...  I mean, there's evoking empathy and then there's whatever these guys do, and I'm a complete mess and unfit for company right now and I just want them to do it to me again.

The novel, written in such a profusion of incredible poetic imagery and language that I wish my Arabic was better so I could enjoy the original*, concerns two men: an academic, Nameer, who emigrated from Iraq to the United States, and Wadood, a bookseller he met on a trip back to Baghdad. Nameer's story of academic life in an adopted country is interesting enough, if kind of just a slight variant on the male narcissist writer narrative we're sick of from the likes of Updike and Irving, but is quickly and rightly subsumed by his obsession with Wadood's life's work: a catalog of person, animal and "inanimate" (I'll explain the scare quotes in a moment) object destroyed, minute by minute, in the Iraq War.** Wadood presented Nameer with a draft of this work on their first meeting, and Nameer, blown away by its beauty, tragedy and importance, wants more than anything that it be published in Arabic for the home crowd and then that he be allowed to translate it into English for a wider audience. 

Destruction also has a tablet preserved, somewhere in the netherworld. On it are written the names of everything that will be obliterated and everyone who will die. Every night I see myself flying and I read what's written and I come back to write it in my catalog.

It's not 100% clear whether this passage, like many in the book, is meant to be understood as Nameer's or Wadood's writing, but ultimately it doesn't matter; Gene Wolfe fans like me are quite accustomed to blurred narrator identities, but unlike in a Gene Wolfe book, I don't feel like the question of who is writing what is meant to be a puzzle for me to solve; the blurring is the point; the two men's experiences dovetail. One could almost see them as one man split in two by, say, a quantum event, whether or not a family home was destroyed by a bomb in war-torn Baghdad in their youth. The man who came upon the rubble as a boy became Wadood; the one who didn't escaped Iraq and became Nameer. Who didn't really escape at all, as his fixation on Wadood and his work and his encounters with a therapist make readily apparent.

Of course it's Wadood's "Colloquies" which really set this work apart. Antoon-as-Wadood does a heartbreakingly perfect job of imbuing things like walls and rolls of film with personality, memory and emotional resonance. Hints throughout point to everything named in these Colloquies having been within or at least associated with the aforementioned destroyed home, but they could just as easily have been things all over Baghdad that were destroyed in the same attack.

Anyway, like I said, I'm a wreck now, and I've got to take a break from this project (especially since the next few of the books from the Best Translated Book Award long list that I've got, I've got as audio books, and I don't consume those as rapidly as I did back when I was stuck half-blind in the attic last year). But I've still got several to go before I read the one that actually won, so keep watching this space, friends.

And give this one a look. Just have some tissues handy. And be prepared to apologize to the ones you use and throw away.

*I loved Urdu poetry the most when I was studying that language! Which I've forgotten most of in the 20-some years since I blew off my grad school research to do that! So I know I could improve my Arabic enough to open up this pleasure to me as well, but... which flavor of Arabic? 

**Peter Greenaway fans take note: if you love Greenaway's mania for lists and catalogs, this is your novel.