Notified by direct experience on the battlefronts of Iraq and Syria, Abdoh records the horror, confusion, and absurdity of fight from a seldom-glimpsed viewpoint that broadens our understanding of the war book. “As much a meditation on time and memory as it is a book about war … Abdoh skillfully catches battle’s intrinsic absurdity … For many Americans, the disputes in Syria and Iraq have actually ended up being abstractions, separated from our lives by geographic along with psychic borders. Abdoh collapses these limits, providing a disjointed truth in which war and daily life are inextricably laced …[The novel shines] a fantastic, feverish light on the nature of not just contemporary war but all war, and even of life itself.”– New York Times Book Evaluation “A skillful, stylish unique told from the perspective of a disaffected Iranian writer who is drawn to the militias fighting in Syria and Iraq. Abdoh magnificently highlights the paradoxes of war in the field and on the house front, alternating minutes of brutality and comradeship and showing war’s pointless heroisms, its random mishaps, its absurdities, and its ongoing human costs. This is at as soon as a penetrating look at the catastrophe in Syria and Iraq, and a caring yet gimlet-eyed view of masculinity, art, and cultural politics.”– The Millions, Among the Most-Anticipated Books of 2020 One of Vulture’s Fall 2020 Best Brand-new Books “Abdoh checks out the lives behind the war-torn headings in a manner that captures the full humankind of the participants. Channeling a little bit of Tim O’Brien and a bargain of Joseph Heller, he has composed the best unique to date on the Middle East’s continuous wars.”– Library Journal, STARRED review “A superb pressure cooker of a book … Abdoh brilliantly fuses the confusions of battle and modern life to produce an unforgettable book. This is among the best works of literature on the war versus ISIS to date.”– Publishers Weekly, STARRED review, Book of the Week Saleh, the narrator of Out of Mesopotamia, is a middle-aged Iranian reporter who moonlights as an author for among Iran’s most popular TELEVISION programs but can not keep himself far from the cutting edge in neighboring Iraq and Syria. There, the battle against the Islamic State is a proxy war, an existential battle, a statement of faith, and, for some, a passing weekend affair. After weeks invested dodging RPGs, seeing acts of savagery and stupidity, Saleh goes back to civilian life in Tehran but finds it to be an unbearably dislocating experience. Pursued by his main handler from state security, opportunistic associates, and the woman who broke his heart, Saleh has reason to once again get away from daily life. Surrounded by men whose desire to accomplish martyrdom both amazes and appalls him, Saleh has a hard time to make sense of himself and the turmoil in his middle. An unmatched glance into “limitless war” from a Middle Eastern viewpoint, Out of Mesopotamia follows in the tradition of the Western canon of martial writers– from Hemingway and Orwell to Tim O’Brien and Philip Caputo– however then subverts and expands upon the genre before entirely blowing it apart. Drawing from his firsthand experience of being embedded with Shia militias on the ground in Iraq and Syria, Abdoh provides agency to the voiceless while using a meditation on war that is moving, humane, darkly funny, and resonantly true.
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