Chronicles of the Iraqi nightmare

'The Corpse Washer' by Sinan Antoon (Yale University Press, 200 pages, $13)

The novelist Sinan Antoon has been described in the Arab press as "the chronicler of the Iraqi nightmare" and "the voice of the disaffections of modern Iraq." His second novel "The Corpse Washer" is short in length but ambitious in scope, giving a broad sweep of the country's blood-soaked recent decades by focusing on the travails of a single character.

The book tells the story of protagonist Jawad from his boyhood at school to his adulthood in Baghdad, through the eight-year Iran-Iraq War, the first Gulf War, and the chaos of sectarian civil war that followed the 2003 U.S. invasion. His father works as a "mghassilchi" washing and shrouding dead bodies in a Shia neighborhood, and he wants Jawad to take on the family business. Jawad, however, wants to focus on sculpture and art, enrolling at the Baghdad Academy of Fine Arts in the late 1980s. He meets women and tries to escape the gloomy future offered by the corpse washing shop, but the steady job provided by his father's shop becomes impossible to avoid as the dead bodies stack up and Iraq is engulfed by chaotic violence.

The washing and shrouding of corpses is described in a number of beautiful, near-hypnotic passages. Over the door of the shop hangs the Quranic verse, "Every soul shall taste death," which is repeated like a dark mantra throughout the novel. Like the coffin maker who profits from the death of his fellow villagers in the Chekhov story "Rothschild's Fiddle," Jawad does a brisk business as the corpses stack up over the years, but unlike Chekhov's coffin maker he is tortured by his work. "Didn't I eat and drink what death earned for us?" he reflects at one point. "Death's fingers were crawling...