The President’s Gardens
by Muhsin Al-Ramli
by alexreadsboooks
On the morning of the third day of Ramadan, a
village in Iraq wakes to find the heads of nine of its men stacked in banana
crates by the bus stop. One of them, known to his friends as Ibrahim the Fated,
is one of the most wanted men in Iraq. From the village of his birth through
three wars and the lives of his best friends, The
President’s Gardens tells the story of how Ibrahim earned the enmity of so
many people, and of what lies buried in the Presiden’s Gardens, unknown to the
people of Iraq.
I was really excited when I found this
book at the book shop a few months ago, because I haven’t read anything by an
Iraqi author before and so I jumped at the chance of buying it. It’s not a decision I regret.
The President’s Garden is beautifully written and I was
drawn in as soon as I opened it. Set in a country that as an outsider I connect
more with news of war and terrorism than with beauty, it manages to convey an
image of Iraq that does find the beauty, even in a situation as terrible as the
one the country is still in.
The great thing about
the narration is that while it takes a winding path from the discovery of the
heads through the histories of Ibrahim and his two best friends, Abdullah Kafka
and Tariq the Befuddled, back to the events at the beginning of the novel, it
never seems pointless or dull. The story is told so vividly and interesting
that I couldn’t put the book down until I had finished it.
I also really liked the
characters, they were complex and interesting, and while most of them
were male, I really liked the women as well. Especially Ibrahim’s daughter
Qisma was very compelling in her desire to live a better life than the one she
knew from the village.
But most importantly, it
struck me how seldom we get to hear about the victims of the war in Iraq
compared to the amount of stories we get to hear about the Western side of it.
And because of that I think this book is actually really important, because
while it’s only one novel, there is not a single American in it, and for those
who still struggle with realising that the people in Iraq are just as human as
we are in the West, I think it would help them to understand things on the
other side of the conflict a little better.
Summary:
The President’s Gardens is an epic novel
about Saddam Hussein’s Iraq, following the lives of three friends from the
beginning of the Iran-Iraq War to the aftermath of the American invasion.
Abdullah loses twenty
years to Iranian captivity before returning to learn the terrible truth of his
birth. Tariq, the son of the local Sheik, avoids the army, and becomes a man of
power and influence, able to help his friends but always careful to keep his
own interests closest to his heart. Ibrahim loses a foot in the first Gulf War
and his wife to cancer before taking on a menial job in the gardens of one of
the president’s many palaces – a job whose responsibilities will escalate
beyond his wildest imaginings.
The multiple,
multi-generational stories woven together in The President’s Gardens are brought
to life by a vivid and memorable cast of characters, and may remind the reader
of The Kite-Runner, The Yellow Birds and One Hundred Years of Solitude. Epic in
scope, moving, philosophical and true, it packs an ocean of wisdom in its 400
pages, and has much to impart about war and oppression, love and marriage,
fathers and daughters, and what it means to live under a murderous,
totalitarian regime.
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