OUT OF MESOPOTAMIA
By Salar Abdoh
“We are not provided with wisdom,” Marcel Proust wrote in “Remembrance of Things Past,” “we must discover it for ourselves, after a journey through the wilderness which no one else can take for us.” In Salar Abdoh’s latest novel, “Out of Mesopotamia,” the journey leads to the most recent wars in Iraq and Syria. Saleh, the protagonist, is a journalist embedded with the Iranian-backed militias that have fought against the Islamic State for the better part of a decade. Early on in his story, which toggles between the battlefield and the home front, Saleh finds a volume of Proust’s masterwork, left by a fighter in a ruined building. This text underpins Abdoh’s novel, which is as much a meditation on time and memory as it is a book about war.
Like Proust’s literary devices, the modern battlefield has collapsed traditional experiences of time; now, fighters dodge bullets one minute while texting their loved ones the next, and the metric of a successful suicide attack is measured by how many likes its video gets on Facebook. This is a new, disorienting conception of war, one that Saleh must navigate as he travels between the front lines and his home in Tehran, where he attends literary events, art show openings and meetings for a television show he is writing about a heroic sniper based on a dead friend. Always, the battlefield beckons, and he struggles to exist between these disparate realities. “I do not know in how many worlds a person can live simultaneously,” Saleh wonders, “before they lose themselves completely.”
Dogged by his handler from state security, unscrupulous art dealers and the woman who broke his heart, Saleh ultimately finds the battlefield a respite from life’s mundane demands. In this, he isn’t alone: Among the militias is an international coterie of clerics and fighters lured to the front because “the war was fresh. It made everything else irrelevant.”
To make sense of his own life, Saleh aligns himself with two divergent yet interrelated forces: war and art. His sojourns to battle are punctuated by a religious pilgrimage to the holy city of Samarra with Miss Homa, an elderly artist whose work finds value only in her twilight years. The trips frame the novel’s larger questions about the meaning of life and its interrelationship with martyrdom and death. These themes sound weighty, but the novel carries them lightly. Abdoh skillfully captures combat’s intrinsic absurdity. He sketches a particularly colorful Frenchman, Claude Richard, whom his comrades give the nom de guerre Abu Faranci (Father of the French), and who seeks martyrdom in Syria after a contentious divorce. His fate, like war, is both affecting and ridiculous.
For many Americans, the conflicts in Syria and Iraq have become abstractions, separated from our lives by geographic as well as psychic boundaries. Abdoh collapses these boundaries, presenting a disjointed reality in which war and everyday life are inextricably entwined. The result, Saleh asserts late in the novel, is that “the transience of it all made us mad men.” This discovery of collective madness seems closest to the achieved wisdom Proust alluded to, attained only after a long journey through the wilderness. The novel arrives at that wisdom by shining a brilliant, feverish light on the nature of not only modern war but all war, and even of life itself.
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Torn Between War and Art, a Journalist Chooses Both - The New York Times
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