'The Baghdad Eucharist' by Sinan Antoon

 'The Baghdad Eucharist' by Sinan Antoon, translated by Maia Tabet (Hoopoe, American University in Cairo Press, 136 pages, $15)

In the opening sentence of "The Baghdad Eucharist," a young woman storms out after an argument, blasting her cousin for "living in the past." The disagreement between Maha and Youssef lights the touch paper of this short, bruising novel which dramatizes the clash of generations within an Iraqi Christian family in the violent crucible of contemporary Baghdad. 

The novel is Antoon's third, published in Arabic with the title "Ya Maryam" (Ave Maria) and shortlisted for the International Prize for Arabic Fiction in 2013. This taut English translation appears a few years after Antoon's equally unsettling, equally impressive "The Corpse Washer."  

Once again, he delicately weaves reflections on social and political breakdown with a story of private and personal trauma. Commenting on contemporary history through the prism of one family's difficulties could feel artificial in the hands of a less skilled author, but Antoon pulls it off with conviction.

Maha and her husband have moved into Youssef's house after a car bomb destroyed their own apartment. The distant cousins may now live in the same house but mentally they are worlds apart. "Deprivation, violence, and displacement were the first things she tasted in life. I, on the other hand, had lived in prosperous times, which I still remembered and continued to believe were real," Youssef reflects. Maha accuses him of living in the past, unwilling to accept the brutal reality of a present-day Baghdad roiled by conflict and rising sectarianism. "Perhaps the past was like the garden which I so loved and which I tended as if it were my own daughter, just...