| Zusammenfassung: | An engineer by training, Murtedha Gzar is one of Iraq’s youngest yet most accomplished novelists. Gzar’s second novel, Mr. Asghar Akbar,has been described as a magical ethnography of the Shiite city of Najaf as well as an innovation in Arabic narrative modes. Reminiscent of García Márquez’s Macondo, Gzar’s magical version of Najaf disrupts the conventions of narration that dominate Iraqi fiction. Three sisters, Nazma, Wahidiyya, and Maaina, narrate the events of the novel synchronously. They tell the story of their grandfather by rearranging the letters on the lead sorts (pieces of type) that make up the remains of a decayed printing press, the legacy of their grandfather, Asghar Akbar. By type-narrating the story of the horse genealogist who settled in Najaf during the nineteenth century, later to become the city’s most acclaimed family genealogist, they commit typos that affect the development of the plot. In the process, they take the reader on a giddy ride through the political history of the city, rewriting and distorting the conventional narratives of key events from the 1918 British occupation of the city to its popular uprising against Saddam Hussein. The following is an excerpt.
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