Bo Hamby and Simone Popperl produced and edited this interview for broadcast at NPR. Patrick Jarenwattananon adapted it for the Web.

The novelist and poet Sinan Antoon grew up in Baghdad, Iraq — a city that’s known many years of sorrow.

He was born to an Iraqi father and an American mother, and lived there until 1991. That was the year of the first U.S. invasion of Iraq, when he hid in the basement of a restaurant as U.S. bombs fell.

Antoon later moved to New York. But after the United States bombed Baghdad again in 2003, and took over Iraq, Antoon went back to make a documentary film.

He stayed at a hotel, since its generators guaranteed electricity with which to recharge the filmmaking equipment. Staying at a hotel also emphasized that Antoon was no longer at home in his hometown — that Baghdad had changed through years of sanctions and war.

“Because of all of the upheaval of the last two, three decades, almost 4 million Iraqis left Iraq,” he says in an interview. “So when I went back to Baghdad, all of my relatives had left to various countries, and many of the friends of my generation had left. And to go to your hometown and stay at a hotel — meaning you don’t have any close friends or relatives that you could stay with — it’s still odd, I think.”

In time, Antoon — now a professor at NYU, and the author of several novels and collections of poetry — wrote a work of fiction loosely inspired by his experiences during that 2003 visit. The Book of Collateral Damage, written in Arabic and translated to English by Jonathan Wright, is a story of all that Iraq lost.

Interview Highlights

On the title of The Book of Collateral Damage

In the imaginary encounter that the narrator has in Baghdad with a strange character who’s a bookseller in the famed al-Mutanabi Street in downtown Baghdad (where old, rare and new books are sold) he meets this strange bibliophile who has this project of documenting everything that the war destroys minute-by-minute — and not just human beings, but objects and trees and animals and so on and so forth. And that’s the kernel of the book.

But I’ve always been haunted by this concept of collateral damage, and it goes back to my personal experience. Because the 1991 war, which I experienced after leaving the country and watching how it was covered, and how this concept of collateral damage makes the massive destruction of lives just an abstract concept. And it becomes, as I say in the novel, like a black hole into which humans, lives, houses, objects — entire lives and potential lives disappear.

So “the book of collateral damage” is this project that the bookseller in Baghdad is working on, but it’s almost an impossible project because he wants to document, minute-by-minute, everything that gets destroyed. And the objects themselves tell their story, but he never gets beyond the first minute (…)

On recently attending the Baghdad International Book Fair