The Corpse Washer Sinan Antoon

Young Jawad, born to a traditional Shi'ite family of corpse washers and shrouders in Baghdad, decides to abandon the family tradition, choosing instead to become a sculptor, to celebrate life rather than tend to death. He enters Baghdad's Academy of Fine Arts in the late 1980s, in defiance of his father's wishes and determined to forge his own path. But the circumstances of history dictate otherwise. Saddam Hussein's bellicose dictatorship reaps war, economic disruption, occupation, and sectarian violence, one following another in dreadful succession. Corpses pile up, and Jawad returns to the inevitable washing and shrouding. Trained as an artist to shape materials to represent life aesthetically, he now must contemplate how death shapes daily life and the bodies of Baghdad's inhabitants. Through the struggles of a single desperate family, Sinan Antoon's novel shows us the heart of Iraq's complex and violent recent history. Descending into the underworld where the borders between life and death are blurred and where there is no refuge from unending nightmares, Antoon limns a world of great sorrows, a world where the winds wail.

Sinan Antoon is a poet, novelist, and translator. Born and raised in Baghdad, he left Iraq after the 1991 Gulf War. He is associate professor at the Gallatin School, New York University, and co-founder and co-editor of the cultural page of Jadaliyya. The Corpse Washer is his third novel. He lives in New York City.