Guantanamo: A Novel
by Michael LindgrenArticle Tools
Dorothea Dieckmann [Trans. Tim Mohr]
Soft Skull Press
On sale Aug. 24
To most Americans, the name Guantanamo is convenient shorthand for the excesses of the so-called War On Terror. No one who reads Dorothea Dieckmann’s lacerating novel, however, will ever again have the comfort of
thinking of the infamous prison in abstract terms.
Guantanamo: A Novel is an unforgiving read. Dieckmann, a German novelist and critic, takes as her protagonist a young tourist named Rashid and drops him without exposition into a nightmarish series of torture and beatings. The effect, in the hands of her calm, precise, lyrical prose, is disorienting and scouringly brutal. Only through a series of hallucinatory flashbacks does the reader learn how cruelly arbitrary Rashid’s fate is.
Judging Dieckmann’s novel, which is well-served by Tim Mohr’s extraordinarily nuanced translation, is a question of literary prejudice. The book is beautifully written and clearly serves a moral purpose; at the same time, reading it is a grim and joyless experience. Ironically, perhaps only a European could provide such an enervating account of the fallout of America’s national obsession.
Soft Skull Press
On sale Aug. 24
To most Americans, the name Guantanamo is convenient shorthand for the excesses of the so-called War On Terror. No one who reads Dorothea Dieckmann’s lacerating novel, however, will ever again have the comfort of
thinking of the infamous prison in abstract terms.
Guantanamo: A Novel is an unforgiving read. Dieckmann, a German novelist and critic, takes as her protagonist a young tourist named Rashid and drops him without exposition into a nightmarish series of torture and beatings. The effect, in the hands of her calm, precise, lyrical prose, is disorienting and scouringly brutal. Only through a series of hallucinatory flashbacks does the reader learn how cruelly arbitrary Rashid’s fate is.
Judging Dieckmann’s novel, which is well-served by Tim Mohr’s extraordinarily nuanced translation, is a question of literary prejudice. The book is beautifully written and clearly serves a moral purpose; at the same time, reading it is a grim and joyless experience. Ironically, perhaps only a European could provide such an enervating account of the fallout of America’s national obsession.
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