Samuel Shimon

Baghdad Noir is another short story collection in Akaschic's long series of story collections set in various cities around the world. This time around, the stories all center on Baghdad and its outskirts, and thirteen of the collection's fourteen stories are written by Iraqi authors. As in all short story collections I've ever read, the stories can be a little hit-or-miss depending on the taste of the individual reader, but as a whole, Baghdad Noir is well worth reading.

The stories focus on everything from everyday life to the intrigues and dangers common to war torn cities around the world, and the writers do a good job in capturing the atmosphere within which all their mysteries and crimes take place. One of the more interesting stories, precisely because it focuses on a period seldom captured in fiction today, is set in 1950. That story, "Baghdad House," though, has a bit of a nebulous endings and is not among my favorites, as it turns out.

My favorites are "Jasim's File," a story with a bit of a twist at the end about a man who escapes from a mental institution when the building is hit in during a firefight, and "Baghdad on Borrowed Time," a well crafted story about someone taking revenge on numerous members of Saddam Hussein's brutal regime. I also like the cleverness of the one story in the book by a non-Iraqi, American Roy Scranton, called "Homecoming," another story of revenge and murder - a combination that I can well imagine occurs in Baghdad today way more than anyone would like to think.… (más)

Most of the stories in this book are written by Iraqis and seem to rely on a common understanding of Iraq generally and Baghdad in particular. There are gangsters, corruption and other criminal acts, with violence of various kinds happening throughout. There is a strong sense that actions are happening just off-camera - it frequently feels like characters are subject to events just beyond their control or understanding, without a lot of background provided to give the reader a better grasp of what's going on in the characters' worlds than the characters themselves have. The major exception is the story written by the American contributor, which is so different that it might as well be in a different universe. Possibly assuming that his audience is American and therefore has a much lower grasp of reality and geography in Iraq, the American story name-drops a large number of cities and locations, while none of the other stories are written that way.

The stories themselves are, as could be expected, mixed - some good, some intriguing, some neither of those. My personal favorite of the lot is Jasim's File - I won't spoil it, but it's based on very real events and also one of the most disturbing amongst a number of unsettling stories.… (más)