Fadhil Al- Azzawi Boeken

Being plucked from a Baghdad café and deposited in a cell block for political prisoners is a wakeup call for Aziz. Although never charged with any offense, he must adjust to a lengthy stay in prison. The police supervisor encourages Aziz to think of a simple crime to which he can confess so he can be charged and eventually released. Based on the author's own incarceration in Iraq, Cell Block Five is an indictment of man's gratuitous inhumanity to man, pointing out that the transition from tortured to torturer, can be an easy one.

This timely, elegant novel’s hero is an Iraqi secret police inspector who routinely uses enhanced interrogation techniques, which even he considers torture. Convinced that he is protecting society from anarchy, he is at peace with the world until ordered to interrogate a childhood friend, a journalist with possible links to violent subversives. Then he falls in love with his friend’s wife. The plot of this novel, which was written in Iraq in 1976 and published in Arabic in Germany in 1989, is further complicated by street protests in Baghdad following the Six-Day Arab–Israeli War of June 1967. Despite the grim subject matter of this novel, it is at heart a love story, lyrically narrated.

First time ever in English translation for this acclaimed 'open work', published in Arabic in 1969 to great acclaim, written in defiance of the "sanctity of genre" and to raise the question of freedom of expression in writing. Variously called a novel or a prose poem, the author calls it an epic in prose, divided into cantos. In mid-1960s Iraq such an open-ended form, in which different genres come together and blend into each other, was difficult to even imagine. For Fadhil al-Azzawi it was the core of a new vision of life after the country's tough political experiences, especially the bloody coup of February 1963, and then abysmal defeat in the June 1967 Six-Day War. The preface to the original Arabic edition noted: "Everything in this open novel returns to itself and acquires its own particular innocence, even in language, so that the novel becomes a poem, a play, a film, a painting and a piece of music all at once without ever meaning to [. . .] It talks about itself in its own very particular way, where it says nothing specific so that it can say everything."