Oh, where to even begin with The Baghdad Clock. This is one of those books that comes across your path and is instantly a gift.

The Baghdad Clock has a voice that is part innocent and part poetic. It is heartbreaking but is also a display of strength and courage from a voice that is new to me, one I rarely find represented. I instantly fell in love with this voice and the story of two Iraqi girls who first formed their friendship during the 1991 Gulf War. Even through sanctions, new threats of wars, maturing and falling in love and families migrating, these girls build a beautiful bond that the reader can't help but feel a part of.

But this book is so much more than a tale of friendship. It is the coming of age in a war torn neighborhood that up until now seemed like worlds away. It is watching your friends, your family, the people you grew up, and your home face the devastation of multiple wars, international sanctions, and knowing when it is time to leave.

Shahad Al Rawi has written a story that feels so incredibly honest that I was left reeling with emotions after the last page. ( )

I’ve been struggling with this book on and off for about a year, which is odd, because many people have written enthusiastic reviews of it. It’s the kind of book that, to be slightly cynical, one feels that one should admire. Essentially autobiographical, it tells the tale of a young girl, her friends and her neighbourhood in Baghdad, beginning in 1991 and finishing in 2003. It invites us to imagine growing up under the cloud of two wars and crippling sanctions. It shows us a picture of a community which remains resilient in the face of hardship for as long as it can, and it traces the things which remain important even when your country is falling apart: love, hope, the dreams of the future. And I do admire the spirit and the courage of the neighbourhood memorialised in the novel. What jarred with me, however, is the way the story is told: detached and dreamlike, it wanders in and out of magical realism without any sense of narrative discipline. Some readers have found that charming; for me, alas, it felt only messy...

For the full review, please see my blog:
https://theidlewoman.net/2019/05/11/the-baghdad-clock-shahad-al-rawi/ ( )

The Middle East has been consistently in the news for decades now. Refugees continue to flee the war torn countries of the region. We've learned how to pronounce the names of the countries but what do we really know of the people who live in there? Shahad al Rawi's novel, The Baghdad Clock, takes readers into one Baghdad neighborhood from 1991 at the beginning of the first Gulf War through two young girls' growing up and becoming woman all the way to the present day.

The unnamed narrator meets her friend Nadia one evening when they are in the neighborhood air raid shelter with their mothers. The two of them become inseparable and continue to go to school, play, and explore even in the shadow of the war raining down on their country. They grow, they fall in love with boys, and they watch as long time neighbors slowly emigrate to find safety and security away from the Iraq of bombs and economic sanctions. The novel is a look at everyday life in Baghdad, a chronicle of a neighborhood slowly losing its sense of community, and an account of two friends coming of age and trying to preserve the memories of the people and events of their youth.

There is no real unifying plot other than the changing of the neighborhood and the narrator's musings on it and the people she knows. Aspects of magical realism are threaded through the narrative with the narrator being able to share Nadia's dreams, with the neighborhood portrayed as a ship, and in the person of an old soothsayer who appears in the neighborhood in various guises throughout the novel to predict the future and to warn the inhabitants. The tales of the individual neighbors makes them fully rounded, real characters and it clearly diminishes the neighborhood as each of them eventually climbs into the cars that whisk them away to another life. This particular neighborhood in Baghdad is very obviously meant to mirror the disintegration of Iraqi society as a whole as the wars go on and different sorts of people, never described and never joining the fabric of the existing place, move into the abandoned homes. The daily tragedy of war is very evident, especially in the short history of the neighborhood the girls write, even if they aren't chronicling deaths but rather defections and disappearances. The story was slow, perhaps because it was fairly directionless, and the use of the Book of the Future, set in the present (or near enough) and then moving into future predictions at the end was at odds with the tone of the previous 3/4 of the novel. The writing was sometimes a bit confusing, whether as a result of this being a translation or simply transferred from the original it's hard to say. It does offer a perspective on daily life in Iraq that those of us in the West rarely see and as such will be of interest to those curious about this part of the world. ( )

Behind the scenes of a war.
After a slow start, this became an interesting and revealing narrative about the effects of two Gulf wars and the attached sanctions, on the Iraqi civilian population. Narrated from the point of view of a young girl who grows up in a disintegrating Baghdad, it becomes clear just how insidious the sanctions were, effectively causing more destruction than the missiles.

The voice of the un-named narrator begins as that of a child, which initially had me concerned that this was going to be the writing style for the whole book. Thankfully, the narrator matures and with it her narrative voice. She introduces us to some of the characters of the village, the wacky, the sad and the ever hopeful. I will never forget the watch-marks bitten on the wrists of children by Uncle Shawkat, or his loyal pet dog, Biryad.
As the young girl and her friend Nadia grow into teenagers, they share their loves and loses, until the inevitable time when the black Chevrolet comes to the door and spirits them away with their families to a safer haven, one that will never truly be Home.

It's a raw commentary on the other side of war, the one that we didn't see from TV reports and newspapers. This is a book that should be widely read and now that it has been awarded the Edinburgh Book Festival's First Book Award, this will begin to happen.

Shahad Al Rawi spent her childhood in Baghdad, reaching secondary school before moving with her parents to Syria. I'm glad to say she then moved to Dubai, where I am looking forward to hearing her speak at our Literary Festival in March. ( )

I am not particularly a fan of magical realism so I found this book to be a struggle. The style is not my favorite, the characters were confusing (my own problem since I am not used to names like these) and the jumping around in time/dreams/characters made this into a book I simply could not connect with. ( )