A review for Télérama by Marine Landrot, 26 April 2025
A major figure in Iraqi literature, Sinan Antoon definitively left his homeland for the United States at the time of the Gulf War in 1991, at the age of 24. Chosen, imposed, dreamed of, forgotten, lost — “elsewhere” has since become the central theme in the work of this exile, who holds a PhD in literature from Harvard University.
The Baghdad Eucharist (Seul le grenadier, 2017) introduced us to his shifting style — alternately meditative and hallucinatory — as it sought the inescapable contradictions of human nature. That novel, which portrayed the son of a corpse washer reluctant to take over his father’s profession, revealed much about the predestination that shapes our actions, whether in submission or in rebellion.
The two characters in his new novel suffer from the same ambivalence, but their awareness seems atrophied. For Sami, a retired doctor living in refuge in New York after fleeing Saddam Hussein’s regime, the cause is neurological: the elderly man has lost his mind and descended into amnesia. For Omar, who had his ear cut off as punishment for deserting the Iraqi army, silence and wandering sow an inner doubt he cannot shake. Even though he appears to find stability on a lavender farm, he still feels “like a closed book” day and night.
Sinan Antoon carries forward a double narrative that gradually weaves the two men’s stories together. Not that the two protagonists ever meet — but both have lost their bearings, each strand feeding the same tangled skein. Their memories are muddled, full of dust and light, pain and tenderness.
Much like the Arabic word rouhi, uttered by Sami without fully grasping its meaning — a word that can be both an affectionate nickname meaning “my soul” and a dismissal meaning “go away” — everything in the minds of these lost men is a source of confusion.
The beauty of the book lies in the discreet, loving gazes that Antoon captures around them: a caregiver for the elderly who’s passionate about music therapy, twins laughing with their grandfather — scattered glimmers of human warmth amid the chaos of short, choppy paragraphs written like improvised dialogues, metaphors for fragmented destinies.
