This overwhelming novel by ‘Iraq’s Irvine Welsh’ captures the alienation of people exiled by conflict
Hassan Blasim, winner of the Independent foreign fiction prize for The Iraqi Christ, conveys the violence of conflict and the bleakness of the refugee experience with stark imagery and unapologetically brutal prose. In the 1990s, as an Iraqi film-maker living under Saddam Hussein’s dictatorship, Blasim suffered intimidation and arbitrary arrest. He fled to Kurdistan, endured a four-year journey across Europe, and eventually found asylum in Finland in 2004, where he began his short-story career.
Described as Iraq’s Irvine Welsh, Blasim avoids writing in classical Arabic, claiming it does not reflect ordinary lives or adequately describe human suffering today, and clearly delights in shocking his reader. At one point he is musing on the work of Italo Calvino, before describing “fucking” and licking “arseholes”. I suspect he wants to jolt the reader into thinking about language – the search for the words to confront violence and trauma is a recurring theme. God 99 is messy, and occasionally feels like a work in progress, although there are flashes of brilliance throughout, and Jonathan Wright’s translation of Blasim’s street Arabic is no mean feat.