Product Description

The third novel in Yasmina Khadra's bestselling trilogy about Islamic fundamentalism has the most compelling backdrop of any of his novels: Iraq in the wake of the American invasion.

A young Iraqi student, unable to attend college because of the war, sees American soldiers leave a trail of humiliation and grief in his small village. Bent on revenge, he flees to the chaotic streets of Baghdad where insurgents soon realize they can make use of his anger. Eventually he is groomed for a secret terrorist mission meant to dwarf the attacks of September 11th, only to find himself struggling with moral qualms. The Sirens of Baghdad is a powerful look at the effects of violence on ordinary people, showing what can turn a decent human being into a weapon, and how the good in human nature can resist.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #205128 in Books
• Published on: 2008-05-06
• Released on: 2008-05-06
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Paperback
• 320 pages

From Publishers Weekly
Khadra's latest political thriller set in the Middle East couldn't be more timely. The versatile Khadra brings the reader inside the mind of an unnamed terrorist-to-be, an Iraqi Bedouin, radicalized by witnessing the death of innocents and the humiliation of the civilian population by the American forces in the Second Gulf War. Without apologizing for the carnage caused by either side in the conflict, the author, a former officer in the Algerian army, manages to make the thoughts of a suicide bomber accessible to a Western readership, even as the scope of the terrorist's intended target, meant to dwarf 9/11 in its impact, and the method's plausibility will send a shiver down the spine of most readers. Despite the essential bleakness of the book's themes, Khadra (The Swallows of Kabul; The Attack) manages to inject a note of hope toward the end, without betraying his powerful message of how the occupation of Iraq has brutalized both the Iraqis and the Americans. (May)
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From Booklist
This is Khadra's second novel about a phenomenon that mystifies so many Westerners--the educated, intelligent Arab terrorist. It speaks more directly to the point than did The Attack (2006), for its protagonist is young and motivated by ethnic traditions, not middle-aged and encumbered by Western universalist presumptions. The young man, who remains nameless as he tells his story, hails from a tiny, "backward" Iraqi village, to which he returned after U.S. bombing closed the university in Baghdad. When he is involved in an incident in which a mentally impaired man is shot to pieces by GIs, he withdraws into himself in shock, but when a missile destroys a wedding party shortly thereafter, his shell cracks, and when GIs break into his family's home and humiliate his father in a gross violation of Bedouin mores, he resolves to strike back. Wandering to and through a devastated Baghdad, he eventually accepts the task of being the self-sacrificial bearer of a weapon whose impact, its developers hope, will dwarf that of 9/11. Although the novel veers clumsily from psychological realism while set in the village to noirish ambience and thriller mannerisms in Baghdad to anguished political debate at its conclusion in Beirut, it dramatically embodies the points about cultural clash that Meic Pearse argues in Why the Rest Hate the West (2004). That is, it shows why crystal-clearly. Ray Olson
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved

Review

Praise for THE SIRENS OF BAGHDAD

“[A]n astonishing novel with overtones of Camus (think of The Fall as well as The Stranger)…. It’s simply admirable…a magisterial work of fiction.”
—Lire

“Like all the great storytellers of history, [Khadra] espouses the contradictions of his characters, who carry in themselves the entirety of the human condition.”
—Le Point

“[T]his major author is establishing himself as one of the consciences of our confused age.”
—La Croix

“The logic of terrorism is taken to a virtually ultimate extent in this bloodcurdling successor to [Khadra’s] highly praised novels…perhaps the most frighteningly plausible doomsday scenario yet to appear in fictional treatments of this seemingly insoluble crisis. And if it doesn’t scare the hell out of you, you’re not paying enough attention.”
—Kirkus Reviews

Customer Reviews

Powerful, Frightening and Enlightening
I read this book in French, having bought it in Europe, where it is prominently displayed in bookshops. I found it to be a frighteningly realistic portrayal of the life of ordinary Iraqis since the beginning of U.S. military involvement in Iraq. It really helps illuminate how anti-American feeling has been generated, through the description of the transformation of an ordinary man into a terrorist.

What struck me most of all about the book was the multiplicity of voices. These include the fanatical, militant terrorists who wish to assert Middle Eastern supremacy while destroying the West; the Bedouin woman who has left her village to become a doctor in Baghdad, and supports most of her relatives financially; her brother, who rejects her when he discovers she is living, unmarried, with a man; and the hero's friend, who tries to turn him away from the path leading to terrorism by reminding him that not all of the West is anti-Islamic, as exemplified by the popular demonstrations across the world in support of the Iraqis when the U.S. had announced its decision to invade. This is a truly excellent book that deserves to be read by everyone.

"A Thousand Times More Awesome Than the Attacks of September 11"
Yasmin Khadra (a female pseudonym for Mohammed Moulessehoul) in his novel THE SIRENS OF BAGHDAD takes the reader inside the head of a young unnamed first-person narrator who has been recruited for a secret mission, the nature of which he himself does not know when the story begins when he has just arrived in Beirut to carry out the mission: "All I know is, what's been planned will be the greatest operation ever carried out on enemy territory, a thousand times more awesome than the attacks of September 11. . . ." The rest of this chilling novel covers the events in this young man's life that get him to this appointment with destiny.

The narrator was a humanities student who had to leave the University of Baghdad when the American forces invaded Iraq and return to his home in the remote village of Kafr Karam. Gentle and nonviolent by nature, he lives a relatively quiet life with his sisters and aging parents. "I had nothing to complain about in my parents' house. I could be satisfied with little. I lived on the roof, in a remodeled laundry room." Although he had no television, he listened to a "tinny radio." Then three events occur that make the narrator willing to do anything to get vengence against the American soldiers whom one character describes as shooting first and verifying later. He witnesses the killing of a retarded youth about his age by American soldiers at a checkpoint when he starts running away. The Americans mistakenly believe he might be carrying explosives. Then an American plane drops a missle on a wedding party. Finally soldiers break into the home of the narrator's family looking for terrorists and commit an atrocity that "a Westerner can't undertand," as the family is disgraced.

The young narrator returns to Baghdad, a man on a monomaniacal mission, where he encounters more violence and ignorance from all sides, betrayal and where his views clash with that of his friend Omar who tells him: "No one owns the truth." Although certainly most Westerners will disagree vehemently with most of the young narrator's conclusions, this novel is instructive as to the hopelessness and rage that can blind someone who has experienced what the narrator has and turn him into an Islamic fundamentalist terrorist.

To call this novel unsettling would be a gross understatement. It is frightening beyond measure. We have to ask ourselves (without revealing more of the plot) if the narrator's mission is possible. We can no longer call novels like this science fiction. It should be read with another finely-written, nuanced novel, THE RELUCTANT FUNDAMENTALIST.

Good Read!!
a sensitive book that shows that good does prevail! Takes you into the mind of a suicide bomber/attacker... the author does try to portray views of both sides of the war... ending could have been a little more detailed..