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The Woman of the Flask is a most
original novel—a blend of grim realism and fantasy. Two Iraqi exiles reach
Switzerland, having escaped from Saddam’s Iraq. One of them, Adam, has
brought with him an old flask found among the possessions of his late father
who came from the Marshlands of southern Iraq. He polishes it and opens it: a
fabulously beautiful nubile young woman appears. She has, it emerges, been
the lover of his ancestors going back five thousand years. The novel weaves
together the threads of her memories of Adam’s ancestors, his day-to-day life
and his work as a computer programmer, his fellow-exile, his Swiss wife, and
his coping with the woman of the flask. She is not happy with immortality,
and Adam and his friend confront both a European bureaucracy and an
alternative world of magic and fantasy. The reader is swept along by a
dizzyingly compelling narrative, unsure where the story is going but
fascinated by the journey. The novel reflects the complexities of the world
of today’s Iraqis—an unprecedented history, a grimmer recent past, but with
prospects that challenge imagination.
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Selim Matar was born in Iraq and has lived
in Geneva for over twenty years. He has been a computer specialist, a
journalist, and a novelist. The Woman of the Flask won the al-Naqid Award in
1990. Peter Clark is a writer based in England. He worked for thirty years
with the British Council, mostly in the Arab world. This is the eighth book
he has translated from Arabic.
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