Frankenstein in Baghdad

Baghdad under the US occupation, roughly 2005, a city broken by car bombs and checkpoints. The story is anchored in the old, run-down Bataween district of the central Rusafa side, where a junk dealer stitches body parts left by explosions into a corpse that comes to life and sets out to avenge the dead. The map runs from the neighbourhood's alleys and coffee house out to Tahrir Square, the faded grandeur of al-Rasheed Street and the Tigris that splits the city.

Hadi

The Bataween district

Chapter 1

The novel is rooted in Bataween, a decayed inner-city quarter that was once home to Baghdad's Jewish community and by the occupation years had become a crowded, run-down neighbourhood of lodging houses, workshops and small traders. It is here that the junk dealer collects his scrap and the story of the stitched-together corpse begins.

Chapter 1

explicit Saadawi names Bataween as the novel's home ground; this marks the centre of the district, an old quarter on the Rusafa side near Saadoun Street and Firdos Square.

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Hadi

Aziz's coffee house

Chapter 1

Much of the neighbourhood's talk passes through a coffee house run by a man named Aziz, where the junk dealer holds court and spins the tale that gives the book its frame. It is an ordinary Baghdad cafe, the kind of gathering place where rumour, grief and gossip circulate as the bombings continue outside.

Chapter 1

inferred The cafe is fictional and unaddressed; the book places it in Bataween, so this marks a representative point in the district near Saadoun Street, close to the old Meir Taweig synagogue.

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