A haunting, despairing, dark vision of Iraq from the war with Iran to more recent days. This is a book which opens with nine severed heads being found in a village and that beginning sets the grim and sombre tone of what is to follow. The only light we get is from some of the characters who illuminate the world through their humaneness - Ibrahim, especially, whose simple act of remembrance and humanity reverberates throughout the novel: 'he drew maps of those open spaces, specifying locations by how far away they were, and in which direction, from that man-made presidential hill. He indicated the exact burial site of each corpse.'

Al-Ramli uses the stories of the few here to illuminate the lives of many, and there is an epic, almost mythic feel to the book. It's worth knowing that this ends abruptly right in the middle of a story which is frustrating and unexpected - all the same, a 'heart of darkness' book whose own generosity of spirit is an antidote and small measure of balance to the darkness of the events and history recounted.

Abdullah, Ibrahim and Tariq three friends and there life told from when they were young.
The first secence is brutal, 10 heads in banana cart , Ibrahim is one of them.
The story is fascinating and there is lots of dark humour, it starts with the fathers of these three boys and there life stories.
At the beginning I was bit confused with names. Laughed all the way through, Suhayl and zahir plotting to cover their embarrassing situation.

Ibrahim was my favourite character. The events that happened to him during the war was very shocking and brutal. The aftermath of the surrender of Iraq and how people reacted! I never heard of it .
Uprising in the south and regime crushing his people, It is a saga , stories of people and I felt for each one of them, I loved Ibrahim, felt depressed with Abdullah , cried with Haja Zaynab and that was just the first half of the book!!!

I couldn't get Ibrahim story out of my mind.


I didn't know it was series , that why I was disappointed at the end, I need to wait for the next one!!!!!! I don't think the book needs any continues, So you can read it standalone .

From its attention-grabbing first paragraph right through to the end this is a powerful and often harrowing story, set in Iraq, of family, war, friendship and loyalty from before the Iran-Iraq war to the aftermath of the American invasion. Abdullah, Tariq and Ibrahim are close friends, born in the same village in 1959 and who in different times might have lived peacefully with their families. But political events overtake their lives and it is through their experiences that we learn of what these cataclysmic happenings did to ordinary people. It’s a multi-generational tale of a village, a country and what it was like under Saddam Hussein’s dictatorship. The author chooses to never mention him by name, which somehow makes it all even more chilling, and the luxury of the President’s many palaces is shown in sharp contrast to village life. Al-Ramli doesn’t shy away from describing the horrors of the dictatorship, the killings, the torture and some of the scenes are truly disturbing. The book exposes the reader to the horrors of the invasion and the events leading up to it by personalising the familiar news stories allowing us to see Iraq from the inside rather than just watching it on our TV screens. It’s a dark and bleak book but one which I found compelling and often moving. From a purely literary point of view the text could perhaps have been tidied up a bit but the raw sincerity of the writing outweighed for me any shortcomings. The end is very abrupt but I believe a sequel is planned. Essential reading for anyone wishing to understand more about Iraq and Iraqis.

I never get a book thinking that I'm going to give it anything less than a four Bite review. As much as I read I get excited about each blurb I read. The blurb on this book was no different, it promised to show me the interior lives and close friendships of a village in Iraq and how huge political acts on the world stage effect even the most unpolitical lives.

"On the third day of Ramadan, the village wakes to find the severed heads of nine of its sons stacked in banana crates by the bus stop. One of them belonged to one of the most wanted men in Iraq, known to his friends as Ibrahim the Fated.

How did this good and humble man earn the enmity of so many? What did he do to deserve such a death?

The answer lies in his lifelong friendship with Abdullah Kafka and Tariq the Befuddled, who each have their own remarkable stories to tell. It lies on the scarred, irradiated battlefields of the Gulf War and in the ashes of a revolution strangled in its cradle. It lies in the steadfast love of his wife and the festering scorn of his daughter. And, above all, it lies behind the locked gates of The President's Gardens, buried alongside the countless victims of a pitiless reign of terror."

But sadly this didn't grip me at all and I ended up not finishing it - in fact I didn't even get halfway through. I've lived in the middle-east, just next door to Iraq in fact so I thought I'd be introduced to rich, complex characters and family dynamics. And to be fair I could see the bones of this but there was no meet on any of it. The story also seemed like it could be interesting but the style of the telling of it let it down.Telling is the right word, the words tell you the story but they don't invite you into it. It read to me more like a plan of a book or a rough draft.

It is translated from Arabic so it's possible that some of the fault lies there but I'm hesitant to lay blame in one place, a book may only have the authors name on the cover but it's usually a group affair so yes, maybe the editor and translator didn't take good enough care of it but the author is where the buck stops.

If you've a short to be read pile and a long train or plane journey it might be worth a punt.

2 Bites.

NB I received a free copy of this book through NetGalley in return for an honest review. The BookEaters always write honest reviews.

For many of us, Iraq as an entity is summed up by the images of air strikes on the news and by the rhetoric of politicians and military leaders. It is a place that for all my life has seemed profoundly 'other': my earliest memories of seeing war on television are of the Gulf War, when I was five years old. So I came to this book with curiosity, hoping to learn more about the people who have suffered such an existence. Written by the expatriate Iraqi author Muhsin Al-Ramli, it's a haunting, often horrific tale of three close friends in a rural community, whose lives intersect with the tragedy and chaos of their country.

Read more…

The opening sentence is worth quoting, because it sums up the flavour of the book: its matter of fact style hiding the horror within. It is 2006 and, 'In a land without bananas, the village awoke to nine banana crates, each containing the severed head of one of its sons.' One of these heads belongs to Ibrahim, one of a close-knit trio of friends who have been inseparable ever since boyhood. Now, as his two companions Tariq and Abdullah come to terms with their friend's murder, each in his own way, we look back into the past to follow the paths that these three young men took, which led them from their happy boyhoods to this bleak morning in the village square.

I should note, at this point, that while Al-Ramli's story is not autobiographical, it is woven together from real events told to him by various people, while his own brother - a celebrated poet - was murdered by Saddam Hussein's regime in 1990. This is a land where fiction is simply a plaster covering the raw, unhealed agony of brutalisation which every family has experienced. In that sense alone, this is a book that should be read.

From childhood, each of the three boys has had a very distinct personality. Tariq, the beloved son of the local imam, has always been relaxed and charming; Abdullah, whose 'parents' found him as an abandoned baby on their doorstep, has an innate melancholy which has led to his nickname 'Kafka'; while Ibrahim, the son of a self-professed war hero, is gentle and resigned to his fate or qisma (a name he gives to his own daughter). Ibrahim and Abdullah go off to do their military service while Tariq, as an imam and teacher, is exempt; and, at first, they simply enjoy the chance to get away from home and see the world. But that world is changing and, as these three young men grow to adulthood, the international situation becomes ever more fraught. Their President enters into war against Kuwait, a war that expands to encompass the entire region and which brings foreigner powers in with their air strikes and their bombs. Suddenly these young men are no longer playing at war, but caught up in a terrifyingly brutal reality.

The descriptions of war in this book are harrowing. Columns of refugees - women and children - are gunned down from the skies; mines blow men to pieces; and in one scene, almost hallucinogenic, Ibrahim comes round from unconsciousness to see a dog with a man's head beside him - realising, then, as dream comes back to reality, that it's a dog carrying a severed head. When, in peacetime, Ibrahim is rewarded for his war service with a coveted job in the President's own gardens, he thinks at first that he is in paradise, a world of roses and wonders. But gradually he comes to realise that this is only horror by another name, hiding behind a mask.

Yet this is also a story of a community carrying on despite its circumstances: an extended family of villagers who share each other's hopes and secrets, who care for one another and offer much-needed comfort in dark times. It's a tale of fathers and sons, and the desire to do well by one's family; a tale of mothers, grandmothers and daughters; a picture of a group of simple yet resilient people struggling to understand their times and, perhaps, to change with them. And it's for that picture of community that Al-Ramli's story resonates so powerfully with me. Here is a village which might have been transplanted from any country (with a few cultural tweaks), and in getting to know the people of this little settlement, we grow to care about them. Thanks to Luke Leafgren's elegant translation, the prose has a dignity and poise which, as I've said, makes the tragic moments all that more affecting.

Powerful and thought-provoking, this novel gives a clearer picture of the recent history of the countries in the Gulf, and helps us to look beyond the simplistic propaganda of 'liberation' peddled by our Western governments. It is not an easy book to read. It should not be. Yet it is never polemical. Highly recommended as a rare chance to see the recent conflicts from another perspective; as a way to comprehend the full nature of the tragedy inflicted on the Iraqi people; and an insight into the comparable experiences of refugees in our own time.

For this review, due to be published on 8 May 2017, please see my blog:
https://theidlewoman.net/2017/05/08/the-presidents-gardens-muhsin-al-ramli

This had an interesting story but I really struggled to finish it, I'm not sure if it was the content or I just wasn't enjoying it but I can't say I enjoyed it unfortunately.

This is a novel that I wanted to like more than I did. The novel was billed as a “contemporary tragedy of epic proportions”, basically it promised to tell the calamitous story of all that has befallen Iraq in the past few decades, but from an Iraqi perspective. There is much literature about the country, both non-fiction and fiction, though most we read in the west is written by us: westerners, Americans and British. Much of this canon of work is well meaning, a lot of it is insightful and has real worth. But what has been lacking is an Iraqi voice. There is some work published by Iraqis, but not a lot.

So, I hoped that Muhsin Al-Ramli would help fill that void that appears on my bookshelf. To a certain extent, he undoubtedly did. There is much to be admired in this novel, which tells the story of three friends and their immediate families. At risk of sounding patronising, they’re simple folk, peasants from the country who till the land, rear goats, and very rarely stray afar. Then the war with Iran breaks out, a conflict that was as traumatising for the peoples of those two nations as the Great War of 1914 to 1918 was to Europe. The war with Iran was supposed to be quick, but lasts almost a decade; then, just when peace is established, Iraq’s tyrant Saddam Hussein opts to invade Kuwait. Once again, the village and our three protagonists’ lives are torn asunder as America and her allies kick Saddam’s troops out of the Emirate. One of the friends gets a job as a gardener in one of the presidential palaces (where the book gets its name) and here he sees first-hand the barbarity of the Saddam regime. Then finally, we reach 2003 and the invasion of Iraq. Saddam is deposed and the country spirals into a horrific cycle of crime and sectarian murder.

That’s the basic storyline, so what didn’t I like? Well no doubt I’m going to get critical comments about this, but I found The President’s Garden just too rambling in places. I felt that the publisher needed to reign the author in, that parts of the book needed editing. This is the first novel by the author, Muhsin Al-Ramli, that I’ve read, but apparently, he is an accomplished novelist, academic and poet. Perhaps this explains things. In my experience, writers who reach the pinnacle of their profession can often do what they like; where a lesser author would feel the editor’s pen, they don’t. A good example of this phenomenon is Stephen King, some of who’s novels in my opinion could easily lose 100 pages or so. King and Al-Ramli might be working in different genres, but I had the same feeling reading parts of The President’s Garden as I have had when reading some of the horror master’s longer works.

At risk of contradicting all that I’ve just said, at 352 pages, The President’s Garden isn’t that long a novel. But it cuts off almost mid-sentence, which is odd. Apparently, there’s a sequel to come which picks up exactly where this ended. Presumably the sequel will be of a similar length. So, that will be, what? 700 pages in all? Which begs the question, if Al-Ramli had been more disciplined and had written a tighter manuscript, would there be a need for such a strange cut off at the end of the first novel? Would there be need for a sequel at all?

I don’t know exactly where to start in trying to review this book. I am saddened to have finished it. I want to be able to go back to it and start again.

This is an absolutely beautiful read from start to finish. I cannot think of another modern novel I can compare it to that would fully do justice to this book. The obvious comparison is probably ‘The Kite Runner’ and while I enjoyed that book a great deal, this is far superior in depth and beauty. The only other comparisons I can draw are with the folk stories of ‘One Thousand and One Nights’ but even here it is a comparison that falls short because this is just altogether faster paced and more interesting to read.

I cannot even begin to discuss the narrative as is here, it is too deep, too layered and has too many subtle touches to be reviewed without this turning into a full blown essay.

I have not bought into characters and their heartbreak and struggles to the extent I did here in a very long time, if ever. I want to go buy the hard copy now just so that I can read it again, close the cover and stare at it for a while in awe.

And…***SPOILER*** I have never been so horrified to be left with so many questions unanswered. I have read a review of this book which mentions it leaves without an ending, I expected an open ending, I did not anticipate a ‘to be continued’. I don’t know if I am relieved or devastated. Will I get to read more? I am willing to pay big to do so if it means I get to return to this stunningly crafted world though any wait will be agony. Just please don’t leave it open like this!

This is a certifiable 5 star classic. Astonishing.

(Based on ARC)

I was interested to see that this book (a good translation by Luke Leafgreen from the Arabic original) mentions links to PEN's charity. I have had some experience with this group who support writers' freedoms around the world, especially those who may be jailed or persecuted for writing about what is really happening.
Our views of Iraq are now submerged so much in the 2003 Iraq War - the lies, weapons of mass destruction and continuing fallout through terrorism, daily death and destruction this novel brings into focus those for whom lives have a progress through all such world events.
Three friends are linked and known as 'sons of the earth crack'. Linked to ancient ruins yet where one, Abdullah was found as a baby and adopted into the village where he grows up with Tariq and Ibrahim. Abdullah is nicknamed Kafka because of his pessimistic and melancholy approach to life where as Tariq likes to live it up with the ladies and Ibrahim knuckles down to working with his father out of necessity so that his education is ended.
At 18 in Iraq like so many other Middle East countries there is compulsory military service, although Tariq escapes because he is a continued scholar and imam. Young soldiers soon learn of the despair of conflict and the futility of destroying their lands in sacrifice to leaders whose only aim is power, money or oil.
We are amidst places and conflicts we have seen on the news, War of Palestine 1948 through their parents, Mosul as a training army base, Basra and the port and then the major conflicts of the Iraq-Iran War and the 1990 Iraq invasion of Kuwait.
It is good to read history from another perspective and what is also wonderful is to learn about the intimate lives of the three friends. How parents die and challenges are left (Abdullah is still named a 'bastard' and this affects his eligibility as a cruel blow to his hopes for love and marriage. Ibrahim has an arranged marriage and Tariq, although Abdullah's close friend) prevents him marrying his sister.
All will face major challenges in their lives and the weaving in and out of lives is brilliantly plotted in the novel. There are some very strong female characters and the role of widows in the Muslim culture was one I found fascinating.
One quote from the novel is "As though life - or the universe itself-were a big tent" for me summed up all the themes. The characters are very human, with faults and fantasies of hope.
It is well worth a read.

"I couldn't understand how it was possible for a human being to be that happy just because another human being is terrified and trembling in his grasp. Later, I realised that the cruelty of man is more barbaric than any other creature".

A haunting, despairing, dark vision of Iraq from the war with Iran to more recent days. This is a book which opens with nine severed heads being found in a village and that beginning sets the grim and sombre tone of what is to follow. The only light we get is from some of the characters who illuminate the world through their humaneness - Ibrahim, especially, whose simple act of remembrance and humanity reverberates throughout the novel: 'he drew maps of those open spaces, specifying locations by how far away they were, and in which direction, from that man-made presidential hill. He indicated the exact burial site of each corpse.'

Al-Ramli uses the stories of the few here to illuminate the lives of many, and there is an epic, almost mythic feel to the book. It's worth knowing that this ends abruptly right in the middle of a story which is frustrating and unexpected - all the same, a 'heart of darkness' book whose own generosity of spirit is an antidote and small measure of balance to the darkness of the events and history recounted.

To be posted on Amazon and Goodreads