Before War Comes

Works featured here are written in diverse styles and have widely different themes. Many feature a broad streak of comedy, showing that although the writers represented live in regimes unsympathetic to freedom of expression and often brutal in their censorship, they have not lost their sense of humour. Perhaps the best story in the entire collection is the Iranian writer Houshang Moradi-Kermani’s “The Vice-Principal”.

The story is about a boy, Majid, who falls afoul of his ferocious vice-principal for daring to suggest in an essay that the humble body-washer, who prepares corpses for burial, is the worthiest citizen in society. Majid’s predicament could be seen as a metaphor for the writer in conflict with the state for his unorthodox opinions, but there is nothing heavy-handed about Moradi-Kermani’s narration, which sparkles with wit and metaphorical excess, and engineers a winning conclusion that suggests that, although Majid has conceded to the vice-principal, inwardly his resolve remains unbroken.

In totalitarian North Korea, closed off from the rest of the world, all writers must adhere to guidelines which require them to feed the “Great Leader” Kim Il Sung’s cult of personality and denounce “American imperialists”. One would imagine genuine artistic achievement impossible in such an environment, but Kang Kwi-mi’s “A Tale of Music”, on the surface a hagiographical tale about a musician’s sacrifice for the Great Leader, carries a strange poignancy. No irony is meant, but as the story moves from a woman’s stirring description of her musician brother’s talents to his willing abnegation for the sake of the “the heaven-sent great man”, the growing blandness of the language and superficiality of the rhetoric actually works to undercut the sense of a heroic sacrifice conveyed by the words.

Elsewhere, the novelist Fadhil Al-Azzawi presents a highly entertaining story, “Hameed Nylon”, about an Iraqi man who develops a fascination for his English employer’s wife (the moniker “Nylon” comes from a pair of nylon stockings he presents the woman), and the poet Salah Al-Hamdani composes an elegy to his stricken city in “Baghdad My Beloved”. The unusual concept and striking selections of this anthology make it one of the books of the year.