A hole into which things fall and disappear. From The Book of Collateral Damage by Sinan Antoon; translated from the Arabic by Jonathan Wright. Similarly the illustrative quotes chosen here are merely those the complete review subjectively believes represent the tenor and judgment of the review as a whole. "—Alberto Manguel, author of, "Sinan Antoon is a master storyteller and, "Mixing the past and the present of Arabic literature, Sinan Antoon leads a hallucinatory investigation into the territories of memory and tragedies of Iraq. Nameer is intrigued by a project Wadood has been working on, collecting newspaper clippings and notes to form a grand catalogue: © 2019 the complete review But where should I begin, and how? giving agency to things and places that the war consumes.”—Ghyath Manhel. Our details disappear—our features, our color, our voices, our memories, our skin, our eyes, and so on. –Translated from the Arabic by Jonathan Wright. (...) Some of these "colloquies" are too whimsical, others are too opaque. But then I thought hard about the matter and reconsidered, to discover, or rather remember, that I should be in solidarity with the lion’s victim. In-depth conversations with experts on topics that matter. As for numbers, they don’t serve the purpose. And how can what I write escape the traps of distortion and domination of official history? Note. You no doubt sometimes see a photograph of a famous person, or even an ordinary person. “The gifted novelist and poet Sinan Antoon . Well presented, and effective in portraying the devastating cost of war and all that is lost in it.”—M. Collateral Damage book. It challenges but it also impresses and enthrals." So I have to get down to the roots and listen to the earth’s conversation with the tree and what it drinks from the earth. We rarely notice things smiling. But how can I describe the moment when it isn’t a moment, but in fact more like a tree? "Sinan Antoon is one of the great fiction writers of our time. If this last possibility is the case, then there is more than one time. I’m going to pluck this minute out of the black hole. A. Orthofer, “Autofiction, by definition, centers around questions of the self . by I often tried but I didn't succeed, so the folder stayed as it was". Those who do see them, after making an effort and training themselves to do so, and those who talk to them are labeled mad by your standards. But what about the history of the victim? A moment when the past intersects with the future. . Interview Highlights. The Book of Collateral Damage, written in Arabic and translated to English by Jonathan Wright, is a story of all that Iraq lost. I imagined, even felt, that I was inhabiting the gazelle (or any other prey) in this equation because it represents me and I represent it. However, in addition to the acute human attention to details, the novel moves beyond cultural and identity politics to a posthuman view . The Book of Collateral Damage is no straightforward tale. In Baghdad, he meets a bookseller who is trying to catalogue everything that's been destroyed in the war. The minute will be a three-dimensional space. Please note that these ratings solely represent the complete review's biased interpretation and subjective opinion of the actual reviews and do not claim to accurately reflect or represent the views of the reviewers. . The Book of Collateral Damage Or is each moment associated with its own place in the universe? But why? By the time someone who wants to revise, question, or change it comes along, it’s already too late. . . Sinan Antoon is a poet, novelist, and translator, and an associate professor at New York University. As soon as I get inside time, I can take the moment and analyze it as if it’s a tear or a drop of blood under the microscope and discover the bonds and interactions that produce it. Reproduced with permission. Is there any way around that? Long listed for the 2020 Best Translated Book Award, sponsored by Three Percent. I’m interested in minutes, especially the first minute. But when they work, they prove extremely effective. There’s a wonderful African proverb in Chinua Achebe’s novel Things Fall Apart that goes “Until lions have their own historians, the history of the hunt will always glorify the hunter.” The idea isn’t new, of course, but the metaphor is a gem. It will be a place where I snipe at things and souls as they move. I’m not sure, but many of these condensed moments come just before death. “The author reclaims his own narrative of what happened to his home country and navigates the cultural politics of his hybrid identity as an Iraqi American intellectual. Reproduced by permission. That’s what I am concerned with. All pages are intact and the cover is intact. Our shopping cart only supports Mozilla Firefox. Assuming there’s someone to count in the first place, because the historians of the hunt count the number of dead hunters! The narrator of The Book of Collateral Damage is named Nameer al-Baghdadi but his life-story closely mirrors that of author Antoon, certainly in the outlines. Main | the New | the Best | the Rest | Review Index | Links, Yale University Press - The Margellos World Republic of Letters, "For this, his fourth novel, he explores new ground by depicting turmoil and carnage through a series of richly diverse second-hand sources. The juncture where they meet before disappearing forever, without saying goodbye. There are times that might intersect but never coincide. The victors are always the ones who write history. Those who can see and hear can discern the truth about that being. A deep reflection on exile and the power of books. We acknowledge (and remind and warn you) that they may, in fact, be entirely unrepresentative of the actual reviews by any other measure. (This “how” kept me up at night for many years.) And the universe is just fragments and debris, and here we are, living the consequences and effects of it. This is my rationale and the rationale of my catalog. . “Reads extraordinarily smoothly . I even feel I am it. Read 137 reviews from the world's largest community for readers. Published by Yale University Press in 2019. Sinan Antoon; Translated from the Arabic by Jonathan Wright, Tahar Ben Jelloun; Translated from the French by Linda Cove, Sinan Antoon; Translated from the Arabic by the author, Máirtín Ó Cadhain; Translated from the Irish by Liam Mac Co, Norman Manea; Translated by Oana Sânziana Marian, Carlos Rojas; Translated from the Spanish by Edith Grossman, Rodrigo Rey Rosa; Translated by Chris Andrews, Witold Gombrowicz; Translated by Benjamin Ivry, Witold Gombrowicz; Translated by Lillian Vallee, Can Xue, Translated by Karen Gernant and Chen Zeping, Miguel de Cervantes; Translated from the Spanish by Edith G, Umberto Saba; Translated by George Hochfield and Leonard Na, Kiki Dimoula; Translated by Cecile Inglessis Margellos and. Collateral Damage Summary. ISBN: 9780300228946 . Subscribe to hear when New Releases or Catalogs are ready! Unfortunately we do not have a summary for this item at the moment. Published by Yale University Press in May 2019 in the Margellos World Republic of Letters series. And the ones that have nested in it and so on. And which particular moment are we talking about? Whats more, his protagonist is not someone caught up in the chaos but an exile trying to make sense of it from afar. Is it reasonable to worry about the fate of what I write before my pen even begins to bleed ink onto paper? And all the birds that have perched on it on their way to distant places. . ere are people who write in order to change the present or the future, whereas I dream of changing the past. Among the small differences between Nameer and the author is that Nameer too came across The New York Times' story of a body-washer which inspired Antoon's The Corpse Washer, but, while Nameer also collects material and: "thought about writing a novel about Raad Abboud and people like him" [note: in The New York Times piece Abboud's first name is given as 'Riad', not 'Raad'] he finds himself unable to: "I didn't write anything. But we rarely hear their voices, their whispers, because we don’t try. First, I’ll write down the history of the first minute of the war, which wasn’t the first war I’ve seen. Dead signs and symbols in comparative studies designed to improve the hunt and make it more efficient. Humans say goodbye only to those they know and those they love, whereas things say goodbye to each other and to humans too. Numbers turn us into numbers. Can I enter time through a hole or through the window of one moment in time? The following is from Sinan Antoon's novel The Book of Collateral Damage. It is an unconventional approach but the big risks Antoon takes enable him to perform mean feats. Nameer, an Iraqi PhD candidate at Harvard, is hired by a filmmaker to document the devastation in Iraq after the 2003 invasion. Nameer’s exploits are intercut with excerpts from Wadood’s catalogue. Truly a literary feat, Long listed for the 2020 Best Translated Book Award, sponsored by Three Percent. I am the one who’s been marginalized and disappeared at least twice. But in this project I’m interested in one time in one place. Trying to meet all your book preview and review needs. “An Iraqi scholar finds his New York life interconnected with his homeland’s past and present when he encounters an eccentric bookseller in Baghdad.”—Tammy Tarng. Yes, things have faces too, but we don’t see them. I’m the prey’s prey. The Book of Collateral Damage is a two-part novel, divided into 'Beginnings' and 'Endings'. And you realize that this photograph/moment preserves the whole existence and history of that person. There’s always a moment in the life of every being and every thing in which their whole truth is manifested. The book has been read but remains in clean condition. Then there’s the trunk and everyone who has ever leaned on it or carved their name on it. (...) Formally daring, stylistically inventive, this is Antoons most complex work to date. And the branches and their memory and everything the wind has picked up and scattered far and wide. It’s a labyrinth. I realize there’s something paradoxical and ironic about it. I know I contradict myself sometimes. I’m the one who saw everything, and I see what they don’t see. "—Mathias Enard, author of, "One of the most acclaimed authors of the Arab world"—. The first time I read that proverb I empathized with the lion, of course. Statistics may count us, but at best they diminish our lives and our deaths. The novel begins with Iraqi-born Nameer returning to Baghdad for the first time in a decade, in 2003, working on a film (as did Antoon), and then recounts the next several years and stations in his life as he struggles to finish his dissertation, gets a position at Dartmouth for a few years, and then winds up teaching at NYU (exactly as Antoon did) -- all the while struggling also to write a book. Is the moment the same moment everywhere? -, "So many books have been written about the Iraq War (20032011) from both sides of that conflict, but Sinan Antoons. Or photographs of the hunters, standing next to our dead bodies to celebrate a new record, might be hung on museum walls.
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