“With regards to the activities of the Tracking and Pursuit Department, which is partially affiliated with the civil administration of the international coalition forces in Iraq, the special committee of inquiry set up under my chairmanship, with representatives of the Iraqi security and intelligence agencies and observers from U.S. military intelligence, has come to the following conclusions:
a. On September 25, 2005, under direct political pressure from the Iraqi side, the activities of the Tracking and Pursuit Department was partially suspended for the purposes of the inquiry, and the committee summoned the department director, Brigadier Sorour Mohamed Majid, and his assistants to testify.”
This novel, as you can guess, is a kind of retelling of Frankenstein but during the US invasion of Iraq in the early 2000s. The novel is split in two main narratives, one following the Monster, who is a being cobbled together from the body parts of people killed in bombings in the city and imbued with the spirit of a dead man named Daniel. The second follows a journalist covering the war for an Iraqi publication who is also the teller of the story. Specifically, he is collecting for an anthology of weird stories about Iraq, before, as he suggests, they too are destroyed.
The novel does not exactly read as a retelling of Frankenstein in a lot of ways. It’s not a firsthand account by the creator, but two distinct, though linked third person narrations. Also, it’s not really horror, in that sense either. There is a more clear and defined sense of justice in the book.
To me the novel reads a lot more like a Milan Kundera novel in a lot of ways, where disparate characters try to understand what is normal in a fallen (falling?) city.